Imagine my chagrin when I thought that I nailed a bug in LinkedIn, but was wrong!

My vampire process detected a “silent” change. Someone had shifted up a position. Immediately I was on the hunt for the “missing” record. I visually compared my two lists. And found the “lost” one.

Ahh hah! I had proof of them losing a contact’s record. I complained to LinkedIn support, and notified my counterpart.

A return email from the contact, told me he had nuked me to “eliminate my messages to him”.

How embarrassing!

Now, if he had been amenable to some question, the I would have like to ask him:

(a) What do you expect to get out of LinkedIn if you don’t want to have a conversation?

(b) How does nuking it prevent me from emailing you? Not like I am going to forget your email address. IF you had responded “buzz off”, I certainly would have honored your request. If I wasn’t on top of my game, you’d still be getting my email.

(c) I sent you exactly one personally addressed individual message. Politely, offering some ideas and extending an invite to engage in a networking conversation. And that is “too much” email. What are your expectation in networking?

Now, I am still undecided as to the value of LinkedIn. All though I did sign up for an upgraded plan, it has yet to show benefits. But, I’m hard headed enough to keep trying. I know those benefits are in there somewhere.

I did take away some lessons.

Lesson #1: Investigate the entire list to confirm that there is more than one defect. If I had done that, I’d have been more suspicious if I found every thing else was right. I jumped to a conclusion.

Lesson #2: Try to extract what people’s expectations are up front. Perhaps this fellow thinks that LinkedIn is like the yellow pages.

Lesson #3: LinkedIn’s removal process is flawed. (a) It’s a manual request. (b) It’s “silent”. They mess with my data and I don’t know about it. (c) They have a bug since it didn’t take it out of the search result set that showed him still in my contacts.

Hmmm, jury’s still out.