Lately, the majority of my experience with LinkedIn has been endless recruiter spam (They wardial all the tech people at my office by looking at who is listed a

Lately, the majority of my experience with LinkedIn has been endless recruiter spam (They wardial all the tech people at my office by looking at who is listed as a "Developer" at my company, or just keep sending me email spam offering crappy job prospects) or discovering former coworkers who want recommendations. Looking at said coworkers often yields them taking credit for projects they didn't do or work on. It's like exposing the resume lies in an entirely new, social network-ey way! Of course, LinkedIn is making huge contributions in the technology space - they are the minds behind Project Voldemort - one of the burgeoning Dynamo+Bigtable NoSQL hybrids. They're also a big user of the Hadoop stack and much of their tech team has written some great articles about their use of it over the last year or so. Compared with MySpace, with which Mr. Hacker tries to inexplicably link LinkedIn (For doing "nothing" over 2 years), this alone is a huge boon to the community as a whole. MySpace was a SQL Server + ASP.net shop and as far as I know did nothing useful for the tech community except make us run away screaming in fear from the horror Murdoch hath wrought. What exactly does a site like LinkedIn have to do at this point however? They're still technically relevant - I don't cringe and laugh at the mention of it like I would say, MySpace. It has proven for many people I know in recent months to be a boon. At the very least I get a weekly email with updates of people in my network. It's sometimes incredibly useful to know where people have moved to jobwise, etc. Or if somebody really, really good is now on the beach and just hasn't called you yet - it gives you a chance to grab them before someone else does. Also - WTF is with the site layout? It looks like it's 800x600 fixed, with about a 200 pixel gutter for the content. It looks smushed in like crazy on my screen.