LinkedIn's Dilemma

I wrote a while back about Facebook's dilemma: that while they're sitting on a treasure trove of personal information, exploiting that information will likely alienate their user base because Facebook is supposed to be a somewhat safe place, a sandbox of sorts.

LinkedIn is in a similar pickle since going public. They're sporting a nearly 1000 P/E ratio which is propping up a market cap of 27B. In contrast, Facebook's is a mere quarter of that, suggesting that if LinkedIn can't do something drastic, they stand to lose about 20B of company value. Ouch. Clearly there is pressure for them to monetize, but they need to be very careful about how they do it. They recently announced a service called Intro that would re-route users' emails through LinkedIn's email servers and append the sender's LinkedIn profile data to all mails. They note that this will allow people to connect more with others, perhaps even adding those people on LinkedIn.

I don't know that this is valuable though, or at least not to anyone other than recruiters. LinkedIn should instead consider acquiring services like Angie's List and aggregating various reviews to create a sort of uber profile. Make a person like me want to have LinkedIn, because through it I can really assess the professional qualifications of someone I interact with. Appending profile data to every email is simply overkill because most people I send most emails to are my family and coworkers who I already know plenty well. Most mail I receive is corporate ad mail. For every one of these cases, additional profile data is just in the way. I also need to now worry that if I send someone something sensitive, it may go through LinkedIn's servers as well. Imagine if I send my mom an email that I'm thinking about looking around for other jobs ... now maybe I get promoted to recruiters suddenly as a higher-value target? And suddenly I start getting calls? I'm not sure I like that.

Finally, a note on the irony of LinkedIn's social graph. Promoting more connections actually weakens the information LinkedIn provides. Connections are supposed to be a sort of partial endorsement. If everyone endorses everyone, we get no new information. Same goes for skills endorsements: everyone has seen plenty of cases where someone with no understanding of a field endorses their friend in that field.

Instead of working on spamming and ad features, LinkedIn needs to work on relevancy. The end.