My assumption was that it was an intelligence platform first. Just like Skype, Microsoft decided to randomly buy it.
It amazing really. If you reached out to people and asked them for the information and graph that LinkedIn maintains, most employers would fire them.
There's an entire cottage industry of linkedin scrapers that put a lot of effort into guessing your email address to enable cold outreach.
I'm ashamed to say I worked at one such place for several months.
Apollo is probably the most comprehensive source for this. It's creepy as fuck.
Yes I notice that too. I hide my last name now because at my company it's just firstname.lastname so easy to guess.
It helps a lot but I still get a lot of sales goons. A lot of them follow up constantly too "hey what about that meeting invite I sent you why did you not attend"? My deleted email box is full of them (I instantly block them the minute I get an invite to anything from someone I don't know, and I wish Outlook had the ability to ban the entire origin domain too but it doesn't)
> My assumption was that it was an intelligence platform first.
What do you mean by "intelligence platform"?
"Spyware" doesn't quite capture it.
It's "intelligence platform" in the sense that you can gain a ton of information on individuals, organizations, and relationships that drive it all. If you can track how people move and interact between organizations, you can determine who someone is doing business with and even make an educated guess if that's a sale or interview.
I started writing about it almost 20 years ago: https://caseysoftware.com/blog/linkedin-intelligence-part-ii and turned it into a conference presentation called "Shattering Secrets with Social Media"
But there have been numerous proofs of concept over the years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Sage
Bro if you want people to read your stuff. Don't require java script to view the page. Smart people block that stuff.
Spyware