Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Obviously, there are many reasons behind why LinkedIn took this decision (and indeed made the original purchase decision) and they may be using the technology internally at LinkedIn in other ways. And, I am a fan of LinkedIn and use it everyday.

Having said that, I am baffled by this. While I appreciate that there is a battle own an individual's primary social network and spend more time/content on LinkedIn vs say Facebook. But, IMHO, wouldn't it have been more prudent to build up the functionality of the LinkedIn component while still offering the functionality that 300k plus users obviously wanted anyway? While this will probably be re-offered (it now looks that it is) as a LinkedIn only plugin, LinkedIn are limiting their reach to only LinkedIn users.

Had they continued to build the multi-network capabilities and brought the marketing/reach of LinkedIn to the product, I dare say they could have owned a significant portion of all GMail users and likely been no.1 in the space. Controlling that (and offering preferential treatment to LinkedIn) what definitely add value.

Who knows the end result, but it looks like a missed opportunity that someone else will come in and take.




The original purchase decision I find fantastically brilliant -- and I hate that word.

When LI bought Rapportive they bought access to my entire actual social/contact graph, whether I wanted them to have it or not. I've never done the "upload your contacts so we can spam them" on LinkedIn, but because of Rapportive: every one I email, and everyone who emails me, LI knows about. They know the frequency of my interaction, all in exchange for giving me a bit of information about the people who write me.

They must have reached a point where either they have mined it sufficiently (and new installs are low) to not worry anymore about crippling it, and/or they realize that the bulk of the data that users care about is the LI data anyway (true for me), and they'd like to try and continue productizing it along that vector -- rather than simply living off the data feed it produces.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: