LinkedIn has a great structured search tool. Try finding a better list of Perl programmers in the Bay Area who went to [school you went to] or worked at [bigco

LinkedIn has a great structured search tool. Try finding a better list of Perl programmers in the Bay Area who went to [school you went to] or worked at [bigco you worked at]. Or try finding a better way to run ads targeting facilities managers in the Midwest. LI's big problem is that most people don't have a good reason to keep coming back, so the average reliability of their profiles is in gradual decline. But they're trying to mitigate that with their Twitter partnership, which is causing some of the big business-y blogs (Business Insider, Mashable) to tout them as a sharing option. Meanwhile, the tiny minority of their audience that consists of HR professionals and active job-seekers will always be responsible for most of their pageviews. That's just the nature of the service. (I did a pre-IPO writeup of Linke dIn covering lots of these points; it's gotten some traction: http://www.digitalduediligenceadvisors.com/linkedins-ipo-filing-analyzing-the-s-1/ http://www.digitalduediligenceadvisors.com/linkedins-ipo-fil... )