This rant is not particularly related to China, except that your correspondent’s inbox is alway overflowing because of email related to Danwei, and because my anger is directed towards two online services that are popular amongst China’s resident foreigners.
I speak of two of the most annoying online services ever created: Linked In and Plaxo.
Linked In is a social networking website that is supposed to be used to build business contacts. The theory is that if I am looking for someone to to do business with, I can go to my own Linked In account, click on the names of my contacts, and find useful people by looking at their contacts.
This morning Linked In jumped the shark for me: I was invited to become a contact of some real estate agent whom I had the misfortune to meet at a cocktail party a few months ago. The guy obviously wants to mine my contact list for leads.
This is the problem with Linked In: as it gets more popular, it becomes less and less useful. When I have to take the time to check out a person who invited me to join their Linked In network and find that the person is just a dodgy real estate agent, Linked In has wasted my time. Which would be OK if I had ever got anything useful out of the service, but Linked In cannot make a good guanxi for me automatically: building networks is something that takes time and energy, and my Linked In contact’s contact is no closer to me than if I just call up my contact and ask for his help.
Plaxo is even worse. It’s an online address book with a charming little feature: the site send out emails to your contact list, asking them to update their contact info themselves. It’s a way of outsourcing your personal administration work to other people, a concept which — to me — is just plain rude.
This rant is a call to boycott Plaxo and Linked In. Your correspondent has set his email software to automatically reject email from both services as spam.