The point is LinkedIn wants to be more than a popular company — it wants to be an iconic one. At one point, a LinkedIn VP stood before a giant photo of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. “The entire team as a whole, we always refer to Steve – if we were working with Steve, what are the type of things he would want to push us on,” user experience chief Steve Johnson told me later.

Chief executive Jeff Weiner set the stakes high, bragging that “nearly a quarter of a billion professionals are on LinkedIn today on our path to 600 million knowledge workers and 3 billion-plus people in the global workforce. … The only thing standing in the way of this vision is scale.”

The LinkedIn product is nothing like anything Steve Jobs would have allowed to ship.

It is clumsy, confusing, and filled with features that hardly anyone uses.

Is it more difficult for a social media company than a product company to be "iconic"?  The comparison seems Apples to naranjas to me.

Ha. True. Both Facebook and LinkedIn suffer from feature bloat and kitchen sink design.

Only Twitter has the courage to make their website be minimal.

Twitter is the heir apparent to Steve Jobs' school of design. LinkedIn could learn from them.