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I've been talking to a number of startups whose products hinge on access to a user's email inbox. Now here is LinkedIn doing this too. This trend is kind of dis
by gfodor 13y ago
I've been talking to a number of startups whose products hinge on access to a user's email inbox. Now here is LinkedIn doing this too. This trend is kind of disturbing to me, I can't really imagine a future where most of the services I use require access to all of my personal e-mail. It's quite scary.
- rhizome 13y agoLinkedIn is a public company whose product is actually very simple and whose maintenance and improvement does not really require the number of employees they have. Initiatives like this spawn from boredom in that kind of environment, because the product slack goes all the way up the chain. The Iron Law[1] says that the programmers are going to be bored, the product managers and creatives with input will approve and shepherd the product out of boredom, and the management who launches it will do so out of boredom, all in their own interests. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
- meshko 13y agoUm that part about LinkedIn's product being simple... what??
- rhizome 13y agoYes. Users with friends, an activity feed, and job classifieds are all solved problems that many underemployed web developers could throw a prototype together in weeks or a few months. Tack on that pointless skills voting junk and webboards as desired. Did I miss anything? The fact that they have stockholders means they always have to do something: Google and driverless cars, Musk going to Mars, Facebook going phone...this IMAP hijacking is LinkedIn's current something that they have to come up with to have a story to tell investors so that they don't think LinkedIn is "stagnating."
- meshko 13y agoBuilding _anything_ on that scale is not trivial.