Like I said: the main feature of LinkedIn is a contact list of known people who I can approach easily.
To rephrase:
LinkedIn is a professional tool. The revenue model which makes Facebook a bit creepy (sell the contact info of the users to the world) is actually, in professional context a feature. LinkedIn helps its users maintain a professional brand and market it to other professionals. The difference is between an olde phonebook that would also contain info on all the personal details and the yellow pages.
Typically, professional indices have charged for inclusion. Linkedin provides the minimum feature set for free.
If one does not have any contacts in LinkedIn then the value of the service of course drops to near zero for the individual professional user.
I think we're talking past each other here. There are many programmers that I could connect to on linkedin but there is no value that linkedin is adding since I also can get in touch with them through email and through friends or friends of friends that I know from other settings like meetups and conferences. The fact that I can do this and that it doesn't even require that much effort means there is some kind of disconnect between how you see linkedin and how I see it.
To me linkedin is just another digital silo capitalizing on the fact that it is de facto middle man between professionals because of network effects. Defending their actions in my opinion is also a very weak position to hold when even someone like me that tends to be on the anti-social side of spectrum has managed to build up a network of professional friends without linkedin's help.
To rephrase:
LinkedIn is a professional tool. The revenue model which makes Facebook a bit creepy (sell the contact info of the users to the world) is actually, in professional context a feature. LinkedIn helps its users maintain a professional brand and market it to other professionals. The difference is between an olde phonebook that would also contain info on all the personal details and the yellow pages.
Typically, professional indices have charged for inclusion. Linkedin provides the minimum feature set for free.
If one does not have any contacts in LinkedIn then the value of the service of course drops to near zero for the individual professional user.