I have to get this out of the way right in the beginning – I really dislike LinkedIn. I thought I disliked Facebook, but holy cow, it’s nothing compared to LinkedIn. A bunch of people who fancy themselves experts on all sorts of things when it’s painfully obvious they aren’t (UX Designers, I’m looking at you). There was a post just today ridiculing the use of Comic Sans, which is a nonsense issue that only the font nazis and snobby, holier-than-thou design pedants get worked up over. The picture itself is a textbook case of passive-aggressive.

It’s a sign about keeping a freakin’ door closed. Honestly, I would have been tempted to print a new sign, deliberately in Comic Sans, that said ‘Screw You.’ Seriously, reading through LinkedIn is one of the most painful experiences I have had, and I’ve had a kidney stone.

That being said, it has been useful as a networking tool and communication platform. I can’t deny its help in making professional contacts, its role in my most recent hire, and its validity as a way to maintain a professional presence on line – I don’t ever friend, or accept requests from, coworkers on Facebook for obvious reasons.

I don’t go on LinkedIn that much for all the aforementioned issues, and so many more, however after responding to a message I received there I decided I would add this website’s URL and Twitter account to my profile since I was already on the site. The URL was easy enough to add, but Twitter, well that was a different story.

In order to add it, I had to agree to the following screen:

Do what now?

Let’s think about this for a minute. It wants to read Tweets, which I’m not sure should be capitalized, from my timeline. I assume it means my Twitter timeline, for posting on my LinkedIn timeline. I think it does. I’m honestly not sure.

Then comes this doozy – see who you follow, and follow new people. Now just hold on a minute – is it saying it will automatically follow new people? I can’t believe it would do that, but there it is. What if I don’t want to follow those new people? Will it guess? I have so many questions.

Next, it says it will update my profile? On its own? How? Why? With what? I shudder to think.

And then, at last, the final nail in the Twitter / LinkedIn coffin, ‘Post tweets for you.’ I assume this means it will post your LinkedIn posts to Twitter, but it doesn’t say that. I don’t deal in innuendo, or suggestion, or reading between the lines, I (normally) take what is written or said at face value. If I have to deduce or infer meaning then I will err on the side of caution, in this case clicking ‘Cancel.’

It’s very possible these are all innocent, standard Twitter behaviors. Posts on this blog are posted to my Twitter automatically, and again, I expect that’s what’s happening here. But Twitter needs to really clarify what they’re saying; it was bad enough being on LinkedIn, I didn’t need this as well.