Jonathan says:

❝ I have over 14,180 1st Degree connections, and 12,289 unopened Invitations to Connect in my Inbox. Why are do I have so many “Invitations to Connect”? Good question.

I’ve been trying to accept them, but slowly just stopped. It was a complete waste of time. 94% of them are spam, bogus, or simply duplicates, or a combination of the above.

Yes, that’s right 94%. So, if you think LinkedIn’s user growth rate is growing, maybe they should have an independent auditor look at the profiles that are being created. They are mostly bogus. ❞

Perhaps the more time you spend mass-marketing yourself, the more bots and strangers want to be your friend?!? I often get human-bots requesting to connect, my rule is only people I've met f2f, or people I've had a productive convo with, or people so closely connected we _have_ to connect.

I'm wondering, what is you criteria for connecting? Is LinkedIN valuable for you?

I used to connect with everyone but since 2011 I too have been hit by lots of requests from people I don't know.

I now mostly ignore the requests from people I don't know -- yes, that's thousands of unopened invitations to connect.

LinkedIn is valuable for three things:

1. Looking up contact info for people I know but fell out of touch with. Especially since Facebook started hiding real email addresses.

2. Looking up someone's profile to see what they've been up to lately. This works both for people I know and people I don't know because most people are good at keeping their profiles up to date.

3. Introducing two people in email I will sometimes include links to their LinkedIn profiles if I'm not on mobile.

Engineers on LinkedIn get hit with more random requests than muggles. That's why some engineers take things off their profiles or turn off the ability to be found.

Btw, Jonathan's analysis demonstrates that LinkedIn hasn't been doing basic spam prevention.

That's really, really bad.

LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for $26 billion so clearly it's worth a lot.

http://pandawhale.com/post/72238/microsoft-acquiring-linkedin-for-26-billion-cash

Why is it worth so much? Its economic graph of people, places, and things. Good data.