The Weakest Link?

Back in January, Guy Kawasaki wrote a blog post about the top ten (or eleven, or thirteen) reasons to use LinkedIn. For those who have never heard of the service, LinkedIn is a social networking site which allows you to maintain a list of your various contacts online. Those contacts in turn maintain their contacts, etc, etc. The ultimate goal is to create a network of trusted relationships which, conceivably, would allow you to meet new people through a chain of trusted introductions.

Guy came up with a number of other uses for LinkedIn which were compelling enough for me to revive my long-dormant account on the service. In particular, I liked some of his ideas about using your LinkedIn profile to improve your website's standing in search engine results.

So, this evening I spent time entering in my contacts. LinkedIn actually makes this pretty easy by allowing you to import your contact lists from a variety of popular email programs, both web-based and desktop. Ironically for me, the one glaring exception was my preferred mail client, Thunderbird. Not a huge deal for me, as I was able to make the necessary conversion to trick LinkedIn think that my address book came from MS Outlook instead. Annoying, but certainly not a fatal flaw.

Tomorrow I'll try to spend some time editing the profile using some of the tricks and tips that Guy gave out in a later post. I'll let you know how it goes.

So, are you on LinkedIn? What do you think of the service?