
LinkedIn’s Bad Terms of Service - lloyddobbler
http://www.fullcontact.com/blog/linkedin-tos/
======
_fs
When will you bloggers learn that full page popups that ask me to join your
newsletter after reading an article for 2 minutes = instant page close + never
coming back. Please, say no to full page popups.

~~~
ebiester
So, here is my use case. (I'm about to start a blog.)

I think I have interesting information, but it's infrequent. I would like to
connect with people who also find what I'm writing about interesting, but I
don't expect them to continually look.

While I know that some have RSS readers, not everyone does.

How would you like me to let you know that I'd like to continue this
interaction in an asynchronous way?

My goal is to have good information that people read without being dependent
on the whims of the aggrigators, because the first five people to vote may
just not be my target audience.

The answers seem to be email and linkbait, and linkbait doesn't connect me to
the people I want.

~~~
danudey
At the bottom of your posts (or whatever), have a blurb saying 'if you'd like
to see more content like this, consider signing up to…' etc.

If I visit your site and I only get halfway through the first paragraph before
something pops up blocking my view, then _best case_ I close the pop-up
without reading it, and _typical case_ I close the window entirely and go read
something else.

It's much faster for me to hit Cmd-W than it is for me to interact with your
pop-up/lightbox at all.

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jgalt212
I hear everything this poster is complaining about. In fact, our shop self-
restricts our use of LinkedIn's API because we fear that if we or our
customers became too reliant upon it, either a. we'd be cut off (for some
nonsense reason we'd be told we were not compliant with the API TOS) or b.
(like the OP) we would not be allowed to join the LinkedIn Partner Program.

On a cynical level, I wonder if companies who advertise on LinkedIn have
better luck joining the LinkedIn Partner Program. Does anyone have data points
on this?

~~~
mikelinington
I don't know about making it easier for some of the programs, but you can see
the current partners here:
[http://developer.linkedin.com/partner](http://developer.linkedin.com/partner).

The CRM Partner Program is what's relevant to Nutshell, FullContact, and
probably anyone else who wants to use this data; Microsoft Dynamics and
Salesforce are the only current partners.

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DatBear
People cry about lack of privacy, then people cry about too much privacy... I
guess it gives people something to write about no matter what.

And if you can plug your company as one of the Good Guys(tm) at the end I
guess that gives you even more incentive to write about it.

~~~
bradmccarty
Privacy is a line that will always move, and it's different for every person.
One of the biggest challenges that we face is finding a line that works well
for everyone, while allowing them to control where that line sits.

As to your second point, sure, we'd love to have people use FullContact. But
the post points to many more options than just our own:

"If that’s iCloud, Google Contacts, Outlook.com or heck, even FullContact,
great."

As I said in the post, we just want people to use a _safe_ system that makes
sense to them. It's our job to make sure that FullContact is the logical
choice.

~~~
mikelinington
The article did a good job IMO of pointing out the absurdity of LinkedIn's
position (but I didn't need any convincing; I work at Nutshell, and
contributed to the blog post you linked).

At this point in the pipe, it's not about privacy concerns; this is data
available via the end user's use of LinkedIn. The salient question to me is,
what the hell _can_ we do with the LinkedIn API? Why even have
developer.linkedin.com if your partner program is designed to exclude everyone
but two companies? (A simplification that focuses on the CRM program, but I
don't know what the purpose of their other Partner Programs are.)

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mendicantB
"Collect them all where it makes the most sense. If that’s iCloud, Google
Contacts, Outlook.com or heck, even FullContact, great"

Completely discredit your post why don't yah?

~~~
esquivalience
That's quoted out of context - you left off the next sentence:

"Obviously we’d prefer that you use us, but the main thing is to make sure
that you get them in a place where the data belongs to you and not someone who
wants to keep it under lockdown."

Sure there's a marketing message there but it's buried at the bottom of a long
quite involved post, and fully disclosed. Hardly discredits the article just
because he's an interested party, IMO.

~~~
mendicantB
The post was hardly worth writing in the first place. This is extremely
standard social network (or internet company) practice. The privacy concerns
of just giving a massive dump of all that data are very complex.

Given that, it's incredibly obvious the post was written as a self plug, and
burying it was disingenuous. If that author had begun with, "this is an issue
and we have a solution for you", it would have been much more honest.

