After writing about technology for the best part of five years, you would think I would have learned a trick or two about the effective use of such technology.
I have largely mastered the use of most of the technology in my life - such as my original third generation iPod (that would be the pre-Clickwheel model), the electric toothbrush (which I destroyed removing incorrectly from its charger late one night) and my espresso machine (OK, I can’t froth milk).
Anyhow, in recent times I’ve also familiarised myself extensively in the ins and outs of social networking websites. While I’m yet to Twitter, I’ve blogged (this is one), Facebooked, MySpaced (briefly), Windows Live IMed and I’ve LinkedIn.
Which brings me to my point… Much these online services are quite straightforward to use, which is evidenced in the massive uptake of sites such as Facebook.
LinkedIn on the other hand is not as simple to master, as I discovered to my own embarrassment recently.
Lately, I’ve been on a mission to drive up my LinkedIn connections - partly in a silly game of trying to beat a rival who has just a few more connections than I do (Of course if you received an invitation from me and you’re in the tech industry, that was a not part of the contest - I genuinely wanted to have you as a connection.)
So, I imported all my Gmail contacts into my LinkedIn account to send out invitation from there.
I was surprised to see that LinkedIn sucked just about every email address I had ever used - not just those in my Contacts list.
What I did not notice however is that it had also automatically selected all the imported contacts. I then proceeded to select the contacts I wanted to invite - but of course what I was actually doing was un-selecting them!
This did look to me odd at time and I could not quite work out who was and who was not selected, but I decided to click on the Send Invitations button anyway expecting to see a pop-up asking me to confirm the list of contacts I wanted to invite.
There wasn’t one and the invitations were sent. At first I thought nothing of it, but then it dawned on me that perhaps the invitation was sent to everyone on the list.
My suspicions were confirmed a few minutes later when one eager beaver accepted - it was a friend of a friend whose email address I didn’t even know I had.
Paranoid and a little freaked, I decided to peruse the list of people I had invited - and was thoroughly mortified!
The list comprised the most random selection of people - many who would think I was truly odd or slightly stalkerish for trying to connect with them.
It included a builder I had a dispute with, a painter I used to help fix the builder’s screw ups, my bank manager, someone I traded with on TradeMe, my landlord, my tenant, my mother (would you add your mother on LinkedIn?), a backpacker hostel I stayed at in Singapore last year, a couple of estate agents I viewed properties with, my sister’s ex, and my own home email address.
What was really odd is that LinkedIn not only imported addresses I had personally sent emails to, but also people who were CCd on other people’s emails - hence the friend of a friend who eagerly accepted.
So this increased the number of people potentially thinking I’m a freak or who are potential freaks themselves…
On the plus side, I am now connected to many people who in retrospect I would have added anyway and who I believe are valuable additions to my network.
And I’m sure many of the random people who accepted my invitation will be useful contacts to have some day - already the TradeMe trader has given me some helpful tips.
At least I’ve not received any replies accusing me of being a stalker, or any from people I suspect of being slightly deranged…
