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Silly LinkedIn

I joined LinkedIn, simply trying it out, because I was told about how important it was to maintain a professional network. Being a rather private kind of person, I generally do not like the plethora of networking websites that have started up, much less the ones that expect you to pay for premium features, mainly because I never use those premium features.

But, LinkedIn has a strong policy against spam. It wants to ensure that I do not spam too many people with requests to connect. Apparently, since the time someone declined my request to connect, I was marked as a potential spammer. Weird, because I take care to connect only with people I have talked with or met at least once in my life. It seems that amnesia is all to common in today's world.

To cut the long story short, LinkedIn has enforced certain protection measures against my spamming. Like asking me to enter the email address of any person before I can send a request to connect. This means that I have to dig through business cards, or my contact book, find the email address, and then enter it, which would ensure that I know the person, right? And if the person has a different email address registered with LinkedIn than the one he has so kindly offered me, then I cannot connect with him/her, right?

Wrong! The person's email id is displayed on their profiles more often than not. So, now, my procedure to connect is to visit the person's profile, copy their email id, then click on connect, and paste the copied email id into the tiny box. Inconvenience, but certainly not a way to stop a spammer.

The inconvenience sure has stopped my network from growing.

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