LinkedIn is a Virus

My version: I was on the iPad, somehow hit a link to send invites to everyone on my "you might know" list.

Much embarassment ensued.

Surprisingly, about 75% of people who I've never met (online or IRL) accepted the invite.

I'm not exactly sure why Linkedin is worth a damn anymore.

All of social networking is a virus.

They all rely on viral growth, viral "features" are often pushed despite no one liking them (see everything Facebook ever did). And most disturbingly if they succeed in growing big enough (Facebook again) then not having one can become a bit of problem in real life.

Of course LinkedIn is a virus. It's what works.

Rule 1: Make sure your linkedin password is not the same as your gmail password. I've tried to login to linkedin a couple of times in too much of a hurry, thinking I was logging into linkedin from some request and not reading the actual page. Luckily my passwords are different.

I'd have to say I'm not sure how someone who is tech savvy can knowingly give a company their gmail account info and expect nothing bad to happen. I only connect with people I know on Linkedin (and generally on g+), so I've never wanted to let them use my gmail info. If you willingly let Linkedin scan your gmail, I'm not sure what you would expect to happen, other than it inviting everyone on your contacts list, just like it says it will.

I'm not exactly a fan of Linkedin, but handing out any credentials to a website you aren't absolutely certain about seems a little naive. Also he admits he pushed the 'connect' button, which is clearly going to connect you to someone. I can see asking Linkedin to put a bigger warning or something, but knowingly giving them your info and hitting connect without scrolling down isn't the act of innocence professed here.

Post should be titled "Be careful giving information to websites".

The exact same thing happened to me with http://viadeo.com/, a linkedin clone pretty popular in France.

The way it was worded hinted that I could chose from contacts who were on both my gmail contacts and viadeo users to connect with them. Not send an add to subscribe to viadeo to my entire contact list (who would ever want to do that??).

It's such a horrible feeling when you realize what just happened.

It emailed my grandmother, who had no idea what that was, it emailed past companies HR, ex-girlfriends, CEOs... This is unacceptable. I don't know how gmail could prevent applications from doing that, but they should not even TRY to do that in the first place.

There is surprise when an address book with over 1000 entries is voluntarily connected to a commercial service designed to link people together?

Surprise when closing a browser tab does not stop the request from running at LinkedIn?

Calling it a virus is disingenuous at best.

Edit: ... or a way to get page views.

Here is an example of another LinkedIn Virus (or may Crunchbase-linkedin virus), that I experienced the other day and got really pissed.

1. Go to this page: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/facebook

2. Click on the "In" Widget

3. It says X connections work at Facebook. with "X connections" hyperlinked. There is another link below that says "Follow Facebook"

4. Now you'd think that clicking on "X connections" will show you the connections.

Try it....

5. It actually makes you follow the company.

Now, its not bad to follow Facebook but the other day I was checking out a competitor company and realized it made me follow the company and NO WAY To unfollow from anywhere.

So SCREW you LinkedIn Virus!!

I really despise LinkedIn. A while back I got sick of their emails, so I attempted to unsubscribe, which failed (I got more emails), so I attempted to cancel my account, which also failed. When the news came out about their encrypted passwords getting leaked (and cracked), I took another stab at canceling my account, and that time appeared to be successful because I now seem to be rid of them once and for all.

I'm willing to wager that the "ease" by which this "feature" is executed was not entirely by accident (supporting the headline's premise).

This happens to 13.000 people for me! I kid you not, I wish I made a screenshot, but it said that on the browser, I also tried the "close the browser" thing. It was not my intention at all to invite people to Linkedin, just to invite like 30-40 people that I know well and were also using Linkedin.

Although I never received follow-up on this. Maybe everybody rejected my request and ignored the e-mails, or the invitations/e-mails were never sent.

I felt really bad when I saw that I just sent an invitation to 13.000 people... including ex-girlfriends, connections so long ago, I checked my e-mail box for the next 2-3 hours, but FORTUNATELY nothing came up.

Social networking sites in general only grow through this type of spamming. Facebook was one of the worst offenders in its early days - Hotmail even blocked their invite messages for a substantial period of time. It is no coincidence that many of the sites that use the contact-list/auto-invite feature most aggressively have grown the fastest. Although we might find it objectionable, apparently most users either don't object to it or don't realize that it even happened (my guess would be that hundreds of millions of FB/LI users fall into the latter category).

I use LinkedIn the same way I used to collect Business Cards in the pre-Internet darkness.

The folks you contact regularly go into my address book, the rest go into my desk drawer tied up by a big rubber band.

Outlook is the address book, LinkedIn is the rubber band.

This is wildly off topic, but I'm genuinely curious... What is with the profile pictures of people looking up and to the right, with usually a circular gradient solid color background? I see it a lot in the SV/tech industry, and am wondering if it's a particular "startup photographer", or some meme I don't know about. Any ideas?

I'd point a finger not at LNKD but at GOOG for not having better a better security impl in gmail. If anyone can send an email that requires just one click in it to peruse and use your contacts list, that is a bug. Any 3rd party should need to formally request access to resources like a contacts list, and the user should be clearly prompted by the GOOG platform to approve/deny the request.

YES. This totally happened to me.

Now I'm connected to every apartment manager, recruiter, and random person I've ever emailed -__-

Am I the only one who read that and thought "perhaps you should have paid attention to what you were doing?" I know it sounds dickish, but seriously, why not own up to the fact that not every user interface is tailored to you, and that sometimes you are fallible?

Another Linkedin Virus feature:

the default setting on group discussion is that whenever someone replies to a discussion, all the people who replied before get email notifications.

At one time, I thought Linkedin is nothing but a huge email spam machine.

I've been eyeing the gmail import tool with suspicion, and I'm glad I didn't give in to my curiosity. I'd be mortified if all the contacts in my address book got an email blast from a 3rd party website.

I've always hated LinkedIn but recently it seems to actually have people talking to each other in forum-style threads, which actually makes it a bit more useful.

This happened to me when I did something similar on Gowalla several years ago and I had a very similar experience. It was nice getting the random correspondence from someone I hadn't heard from in years but I was way more embarrassed than anything else.

I hope "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." applies here, but I just can't get the picture of the management over a LinkedIn laughing their asses off because this is exactly how they designed it.

I hated Linkedin since it started 10-ishyears ago because it managed to get to my private email because a friend invited me. Now I know how that happened.

People use it for jobs and so I'm loathe to delete it entirely, but I still loathe it.

Huh. Inconvenient I'm sure, but this actually sounds rather fun.

There are people I haven't talked to in a while. Maybe I should invite them to LinkedIn.

Well, that, or I could just send them an e-mail, but that doesn't sound nearly as interesting.

This same thing happened to me. Thought it was a "see if these people are on LinkedIn". Instead it emailed them. Somewhat mortifying, but fortunately I tested with a limited subset of my address book.

I hate that LinkedIn tricks you into endorsing others and accepting endorsements. It was embarrassing to get endorsed for my expertise on Excel from people I barely knew.

This a a case where the double confirmation would be a good design decision. "Are you sure?" "Click yes to invite 1000 people to connect."

I wonder how many of the 1,138 accepted the request?

There's only three types of folks that contact me on LinkedIn: bots, recruiters and prostitutes.

Correction, that's only two types...

Happened to me a few months ago, didn't delete my linked in account, but pretty much stopped using it.

Did the exact same thing over a year ago. I can't believe they haven't changed that workflow yet.

I did the exact same thing. Awkward.

glad i'm not the only one

I've got a feeling that just about everything in LinkedIn interface is made to be intentionally broken or deceptive, I think there's a lot of "discourage through bad ui", for example, here's a past tweet of mine, I've actually had to GOOGLE to find out how leave a group:

"http://t.co/RTAOpvTo 10 minutes to find how to leave a group on linkedin and need to follow step by step... discouraging through bad ux?"

How did this happen without giving them your password or using the same one?

So is Capitalism.

LinkedIn is a Scala shop. So if LinkedIn is a virus, I think that's a first for the Scala language. "Scala, good for viruses too!" :O