Unfortunately, I have very little choice but to participate in the platform. In order to simply host my resume online I'm forced to sift through a number of mediocre features, applications, and services. Meaningless endorsements from people who don’t know my skill set, a news feed knock off plastered on the front page, a publishing platform for celebrity-like business people, and groups that send out more email spam than I ever thought possible. The lack of cohesion amongst these services makes for a very confusing platform. And when you consider some basic things you can't do on LinkedIn it becomes even more peculiar.

Want to tell your network you’re looking for a job without your boss knowing? You can’t select who sees your status updates so good luck hiding that. How about a list of connections that switched jobs recently and now might be more valuable to your professional life? Nope, there is no way to search your network like that.

Having all of your professional connections on the same platform clearly has the potential to be very useful. But giving you zero control over who you communicate with in your network and no easy way to see what your network is doing takes away most of the usefulness.

LinkedIn is failing to capitalize on basic functionality that should've been in place for years across mobile and desktop. The basic features are getting blurred by layers of products that really have nothing to do with their core business model. The most recent example being the news aggregation that seems to be slowly extending across the entire platform. This might be ok if I could remove or configure any of these add-ons, but again no such settings exist. An excuse for the confusing interaction design might be that LinkedIn’s back-end was recently overhauled because the old code base was in shambles. Which could explain the bizarre navigation and the Groups section looking like an Internet forum from the late 1990's.

Their new product, “Contacts”, looks to be a byproduct of this rebuilding. From the splash page it looks like a lightweight version of LinkedIn without all the junk layered on top. Consider that contacts, connections, and networking are at the very core of LinkedIn, and here they are launching it as a side-product with a cute little waiting list to drum up some PR. Think about if Facebook launched a new way to share or Google announced a new way to perform searches, and compare that to how LinkedIn is approaching “Contacts”.

Even better is the brand new “Intro” product. LinkedIn blogged about it and said they were “doing the impossible”, but normal people would just call it email hijacking. Intro changes your iOS device to route all emails, both sent and received, through LinkedIn’s servers. Now read that one more time. They force all your IMAP and SMTP data through their own data centers and comb them for basically whatever they want. The value add is that you now see a small box of a person’s profile right inside the native iPhone mail client; giving you a quick overview of the person who’s emailing you. It’s a very cool hack but after reading Phishing with LinkedIn’s Intro I realized how insecure middleware like this can be. I hope Intro get’s phased out quickly and publicly, but in the meantime please don’t install it on your iPhone.

There are lots of blog posts like mine out there about LinkedIn and the vast majority are negative. I think the market could use a sleeker, more modern alternative to LinkedIn that focuses on just networking and introductions. The critical mass of an incumbent like LinkedIn is tough to overcome, but within 5 years I believe most of my professional network will be located on a different platform.

Have you ever gotten a job through LinkedIn? Do you have a premium account and love it? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Other interesting articles about LinkedIn include: LinkedIn: The Creepiest Social Network, Was LinkedIn Scammed?, Quitting LinkedIn, LinkedIn ‘Intro’duces Insecurity.