I’ve been achingly close to reaching that fabled “500+” in LinkedIn for a while now—that icon reserved only for a select few recruiters (13), marcom/sales peeps (5), product/program managers (5), founders/CEO (3), professional networkers(3), VC (2), and Adam Glickman (dude, I see you at Lunch 2.0 all the time, but still haven’t figured out what you do).

So on Friday, I guessed that it was time for another of my infamous LinkedIn Haiku blast to more of peeps who have had the misfortune of find themselves in my address book.

Now, I’m officially a LinkedIn whore!

[More observations after the jump.]

Observations

I reached another milestone: my vcard export has gotten too large for LinkedIn. Apparently they have a 12-15MB upload limit and since Mac OS X Address Book exports the images in the vcard, I had to split the upload into a two parter.

Second is Facebook has passed Plaxo as my #2 largest social network with real people on it: 380 peeps. Ever since my iPhone reactivated a working address book sync with Yahoo!, my Facebook friends have shot up. Sorry, Plaxo. 🙁

The net net is that I’m going to challenge everyone now on my LinkedIn like I do on Facebook and Plaxo. Besides, I’m getting more than one job request a day and it looks like recruiters aren’t even looking at my LinkedIn profile to look at my skills. (How many requests to be some junior engineer for a Ruby on Rails app can I get a day? If it were coming from you engineers, I know it’s all in good fun, but I don’t think the recruiters are joking when they send it.)

Speaking of which, LinkedIn doesn’t have very much utility to egregiously overpaid engineers like me. In fact, its utility, like Plaxo, is very asymmetric. The asymmetry becomes pronounced in a bust or boom economy because labor is very inelastic. That explains why no other engineer is at 500+ on my list. You guys all figured out what it took me a couple years to figure out. 😛

I hope they fix it.

In the meantime, I suppose I can always become a recruiter if I lose my job.

Another gem

As I mentioned in my last blast, every so often someone responds in kind. Here is one from Lydia:

Air mail comes to me
Finding old connections
LinkedIn links are great!

My first haiku stab
Kudos to Terry Chay
For showing the way

🙂