RANT - Linkedin Stalkers

Serendipity is the discovery of something good that you weren't necessarily looking for. I guess the "silver lining" allegedly in "every cloud" is evidence of serendipity.

Bill and I used to work with someone in Denver who, while selling our software, used to claim it had a "high serendipity factor". Now, this guy had a BS quotient of Biblical proportions, but that phrase stuck with me over the years.

What has this got to do with the price of cheese? Well, email is 30% SPAM, 30% annoying noise and 30% necessary, work-related, mostly fire-fighting noise. That doesn't add up to 100% I know, but you're missing the point.

That high TWF (Totally Worthless Factor) is present in most forms of information we receive. The split may be higher or lower, but most input is totally worthless.

Facebook, for example, comprises 90% SIDNTK - Shit I Don't Need To Know, even when it's from my closest friends or family members.

With Twitter, that SIDNTK is off the scale.

Linkedin follows the same pattern. Why do I care if person X is "returning from a trip to Cleveland" unless he owes me money and Cleveland is where he keeps his stash? Even worse is when person X has "booked his trip to Cleveland on Trip-It".

Linkedin has a more insidious side to it too. People who want to connect with you when a) you've never heard of them or b) you've heard of them and have no desire to get any closer to them. It's this last category that spawns Linkedin stalkers - people who keep on pinging you to try to get you to connect with them, while you keep on ignoring them because you kind of know them, like the fact they're not connected with you, and fully intend keeping it that way.

Which is why I particularly liked the serendipitous image I found in my email today, from Rob Cottingham's blog by way of Earley & Associates.