LinkedOut - pruning my network
September 9th, 2007 • Technology
I’ve been taking a hard look at the social networks I belong to lately. Specifically I’ve been looking at the people I’m linked to on LinkedIn. I used to think that the greatest value of LinkedIn would come from promiscuous linking. That is linking to anyone and everyone you can regardless of how well you know them. My thinking was that people would have an easier time of getting a hold of me if there were more possible avenues of access (if you use LinkedIn, you’ll understand what I mean by this). There is a large group of people who believe in this paradigm and continue to grow their networks in the hopes, it seems, to connect to everyone in the world and create a two degree separation between everyone on the planet.
I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t useful to either me or my network so I’ve gone on a crusade to prune my network as much as possible. So far I’ve dropped (or you could say LinkedOut) about 50 people who I was previously connected to on LinkedIn bringing my total connections down from 360 or so to a little over 300. People that I dropped fell into one or more of these buckets:
- I didn’t remember how I knew them, met them, or anything else about them
- They clearly weren’t using LinkedIn (you can tell if people have old email addresses as their contact address in their profile)
- They were only connected to me or to me and one other person
So why does this matter to you? It probably doesn’t. But if you discover that I dropped you and you don’t think I should have, I’m sorry. I probably haven’t kept in touch as much as I should have and my memory has gotten rusty about how I know you. Feel free to reconnect with me via email (if you know me, you should already have my email address) and then we can reconnect on LinkedIn. As a policy, I don’t connect with people who I barely know (this saves me from having to remove you later) and I definitely don’t connect with people that send me requests out of the blue.
By the way, I had a pleasant reconnection via LinkedIn lately from someone that I interned with at General Electric a long time ago. Interesting that this connection came over via LinkedIn and not via Facebook which is where I’ve seen a lot more activity lately.
