09/ 20/ 2006
by Harvey King
According to the networking Web site Linkedin.com, I'm in a network with more than 500,000 other businesspeople. That means there's a good possibility that you and I are in the same "social network," as they call it on the Internet these days. Knowing that many people (or at least knowing someone who knows someone who all together know that many people) means there's a pretty good chance you and I have mutual acquaintances. Who knows? We may even know one another. At least, that's how the theory goes.
Since I don't recall ever meeting you, I recently decided to put Linkedin's claims to the test by looking for you in the Atlanta airport. Since I was stuck at the airport for a few hours, and more than 80 million passengers pass through the airport's corridors each year, I figured it would be a good place to look for you. So I watched hundreds of people walk by for about 30 minutes. Guess what? I didn't see you. Or, if I did, I didn't recognize you, and you didn't recognize me because you didn't introduce yourself as being a member of my network of businesspeople.
I signed onto Linkedin a few years ago after being invited via e-mail to be "connected" with a business friend of mine. Breaking my rule of never signing up for something unless I understand what it does, I agreed to be one of his connections and, thus, a member of his network.
Within a few weeks, a couple dozen other people I sort of know--mostly buddies of my original Linkedin friend--invited me to become a part of their networks. Despite only having a small number of direct connections on the Web site, before I knew it, Linkedin started telling me I have a network of hundreds of thousands of people. I never felt more popular.
But now that I've done my field testing at the Atlanta airport, I'm convinced that despite my having such a large network, not only do I not know you, I don't know anyone. I didn't recognize a single individual in all of the hundreds of people who walked by. I now have started looking around public places in my own hometown and have discovered that I don't know anyone there either. I've gone from feelinglike I'm at the center of some Kevin-Bacon-six-degrees-of-separation network to feeling like I'm one of those invisible people in the movie "The Sixth Sense."
Recently, I heard that Google and others have some new technology that allows your cell phone to alert you whenever someone in your network is nearby--a special ringtone lets you know whenever you're around someone who is in the same industry, went to the same college or shares your interest in stamp collecting.
I doubt I'll ever activate that particular feature on my cell phone. In fact, after watching all of those people walk by me in the Atlanta airport, I've decided to deactivate my Linkedin account.
