LinkedIn: The Good and The Bad

Reading about the expansion of LinkedIn into the niche of service recommendations, I ran into a post of an upset LinkedIn user who had found no good use for the site.

I normally don't do much when I see user complaints for a site that I don't run, but I felt I'd post my two cents about my experience with LinkedIn. For context purposes, I currently have 329 contacts in my LinkedIn network, some of which are heavy users.

1) SPAM: Sure I've gotten (mostly in recent months) a handful of requests from people I don't know, but it hasn't been anything like an unmanageable thing that has taken over my days and nights to deal with. In the end, there's always the option to decline invitations to connect, etc. which is what I do when I don't know the person that is trying to contact me (nothing against people from Holland, but a good deal of the requests from unknown people come from there).

2) New acquaintances: I've landed some nice business opportunities and people I didn't know before are now in my circle of acquaintances. This I see as the biggest benefit of the tool: not getting in touch with close friends (that is what other Social Networks are better at, by reason of sheer volume), but rather establishing new relationships through your existing network, actually making the most of the proverbial "six degrees of separation" concept.

3) Integration with Outlook: heavy weight... It does take up system resources and I wouldn't recommend it. But you don't need it. I haven't played with the Apple Search Widget they offer, but there's a chance it is of a lighter nature due to the type of technology that these widgets typically are made up of. I won't offer advice about their toolbars, since I haven't used any.

There you have it. How about your experience? Anything to report from your use of LinkedIn?