Rob van Dijk's Blog

I was recently forced to delete one of my LinkedIn connections. Why?

I like to follow the LinkedIn status updates posted by my connections. They inform me about big projects they work on, about seminars they visit, about job changes and other career-related events. Until recently I was happily following these updates from my iPhone.

That is, until LinkedIn decided to offer a connection between its status update and Twitter. One of the usage scenarios – a Tweet with #in is passed to LinkedIn as status update – makes perfect sense. Once in while you tweet something that is worthwhile knowing for your LinkedIn connections as well: just add #in and you’re done. The second usage scenario however – all Tweets are passed to LinkedIn as status update – turns out to be a pain for those following status updates using the iPhone LinkedIn app. In fact, it just turns into a useless copy of Twitter. You have to wade through 20 Tweets of person X before encountering a single LinkedIn status update of another person, and then another 17 Tweets of the same person X before encountering the next. As people say on Twitter: #fail.

Apart from this practical issue, it usually doesn’t make sense to connect Twitter one-on-one with your LinkedIn status. LinkedIn gives me the career overview of my connections. Careers develop relatively slowly, and so status updates are relatively sparse. That is a completely different model than Twitter, where the update frequency is typically much higher.

So, to be able to see status updates of all my connections on the iPhone LinkedIn app (and not just Tweets from person X) I had to delete the connection. Which makes me very curious: how do you handle this?