By Jeffrey the Barak

A Rant about multiple LinkedIn profiles.

I don’t use LinkedIn. (Linked In, linkedin.com). I really don’t need to because I’m not in the kind of business where I need to network with people and I don’t have a job working for someone else.

Still, there is no harm in having a LinkedIn profile is there? Well no, if you only have one. But what happened to me is apparently the same thing that that has made many other people cancel, delete and move on from LinkedIn.

You see, when it first started, several friends and few clients, who probably have more normal careers than myself, invited me to join LinkedIn, so I did. But they spelled my name differently, so each time I accepted I became a new, additional person on LinkedIn. Before long all these invitations began piling up, and some contacts went into one profile, others to another, and still more to as-yet uncreated profiles for different spellings of my name.

As commonplace as this situation seems to be, LinkedIn does not allow you to merge profiles. And it is not very obvious how to move contacts and networks of contacts from one to another in order to consolidate everything into one account.

Being a neat and tidy person, I found this quite disturbing. I mean, I have to tidy my desk and put everything away before I can feel comfortable, so this big, albeit virtual, mess created by LinkedIn was driving me nuts. I had to delete everything to be okay again.

For the past few years I have been dragging LinkedIn invitation emails to the trash every day, so I recently conducted some web-searches to see if LinkedIn had ever provided a solution. To my surprise, they have not.

And so, to the trash anything related to LinkedIn continues to be dragged, with a flourish of the wrist on my very tidy magic trackpad.

Jeffrey the Barak stays away from chain-link fences, sausage links and LinkedIn, and he used to enter banana eating races.