Should users of LinkedIn hide their connections?

Alison's Contribution:

I respect your right to have your opinion and I hope you'll respect my right to have a different position. I think that you can focus your energy by searching for the types of contacts you need to make, rather than waste tons of time scrolling through pages and pages of information. I won't make the obvious inference that in my shoes you simply want to "rape" my network.

NB: If LinkedIn was a Directory service, I'd still feel the same, but I probably would not link with so many people.

For instance, unless you know how a person has put in their name (with/without special characters, extra information), you won't know if that person comes at the last name marker or at the beginning or end. There is no option to just see people at Company X for an individual contact, so trying to find contacts at a particular company are impossible; also it only gives you the current company, so if they just updated their profile, it wouldn't show anymore.

I suggest you try the ADVANCED SEARCH option. User Boolean operators in UPPER case (AND, OR) and remember that NOT="-" so if you were looking for clients, I would suggest something like "Risk Manager" AND (finance OR bank OR Investment OR Hedge); with mine, you'd have to narrow the focus as there are over 500 results. There is no way I could have gotten to this list just browsing the "telephone" directory of my contacts. Why, well because just doing this type of errands forgets that you can connect to someone you wouldn't even have know about - eg a 3rd level contact.

Apologies if you feel my passionate response rubs you the wrong way. I just think you are having a fight about the wrong thing. There are so many important issues - how to ensure the information is up to date, how to ensure the information is accurate, how to verify the information, etc, etc.

I think I give plenty back, but I suspect you'll have to ask the people in my network what they think.

Alison Murray
Clarification added May 22, 2007:
apologies - that should have been "would not have even KNOWN about" - now if I could just get that thought to screen input device, I would not have to worry about my fingers keeping up with my brain.