Academic

Two years ago, I blogged about LinkedIn in response to Seth Godin's Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List: "Perhaps the most surprising to me is that LinkedIn is listed among the top 20. I created a profile on LinkedIn a long time ago after getting an invitation from someone, but I never use the service."

It's amazing to me that we were talking about Web 2.0 two years ago (time flies!), and that I was already blogging about how I had created a profile on LinkedIn "a long time ago." Since that post, I have not increased my usage of LinkedIn, but I have accumulated the inevitable small collection of contacts simply by accepting (most of) the invitations that came my way.

Recently, some of those invitations came from law professors I admired and I started thinking more about the potential utility of LinkedIn. Why should I put any time into this? What's the payoff? One of my existing contacts on LinkedIn is my oldest daughter, and she describes LinkedIn as "Facebook for grownups." That helped me to think about it a bit more clearly because I have seen my children do all sorts of useful things on Facebook, most importantly for present purposes, maintaining long-distance relationships that were formed in the real world. Perhaps LinkedIn would help me keep up with some of the many friends I have made (and lost track of) in my travels? Or with former students?

That seemed like it would be worth a try, so I updated and expanded my bare-bones profile, and this morning I issued a raft of invitations to some of my Gmail contacts who are already enrolled in LinkedIn. I have already doubled the size of my immediate network and received some fun emails back. So that's a nice first step.

What I would like to know more about is how people actually use this service. Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments. In particular, do you use "Groups"? After updating my profile, I joined all of the relevant alumni groups, then on a lark, I created a group of my own: "Readers of The Conglomerate." At the moment -- a few minutes post-creation -- this group has one member. So if you are a reader and would like to connect, please join!

Finally, I would be particularly interested to learn from law professors whether they have used LinkedIn to maintain connections with former students. One of my regrets in life is that I have lost track of so many students whom I genuinely enjoyed.