Speaking of Social Applications…

Do any of you use LinkedIn? I’m curious, because in my time on there, I’ve seen pretty much zero benefit. Less, if you count the distraction of random invites. On the other hand, I’ve only got a couple of contacts (though I have several invitations from people I don’t know), and am hardly an expert on getting the most out of the service, so before I condemn it I wanted to see if it’s simple human error on my part.

I thought of this when reading Anil’s entry here, which says “As the wags are fond of saying, and Flickr is fond of demonstrating, social networking is a feature, not an application.” I couldn’t agree with that more. The social aspects of Audiscrobbler, del.icio.us, and Flickr enhance the service, but they’d each have value standalone. This obviously isn’t the case with social networking services like LinkedIn.

I must admit, however, to never grokking the concept behind these types of applications, even going back to ’99 or ’00 when an old colleague was fleshing out a business plan for a similar service. Maybe I’m just being too conservative, or perhaps the analyst biz isn’t ideal for the LinkedIn model. But from where I sit, it’s one thing to connect yourself to others using tools of this ilk – and I do it every day with some of the above – but it’s quite another to connect someone else.

Anyway, I think you get where I’m coming from. Anyone have good experiences with LinkedIn that they can share, or can see a reason for me to continue with it?