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LinkedIn was 2002 of Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly and Jean Luc Vaillant was founded in Mountain View in order to be able to maintain existing business contacts and also to establish new business connections.
At first I wasn't really convinced of this network and that's why I deleted my account after a few years. But when I returned to Heilbronn and tried to maintain my contacts outside, I came back to this network and had to realize that it is very well suited for precisely these purposes. And I've been using it ever since.
Meanwhile, the network belongs, like Skype or Whatsapp also, by the way, to Microsoft and has a total of almost 700 million users worldwide; so it should be one of the best ways to maintain business and private connections.
At least for me it works quite well, especially if you don't expect too much from social media. Above all, however, one must always remember that the operators of these networks are pursuing a commercial purpose and that user data is the common currency.
Since I tried several times from 2001 to 2018 to set up and run such a social network myself, but without any commercial interest, I know at least some of the difficulties in starting it successfully and then continuing to operate it.
Interestingly, I found that most users of social networks are obsessed with making their personal data and much more public, and social media that actually want to protect this data have little chance of surviving in the market .
In the meantime, I even believe that many users are very suspicious of those operators who do not want to be rewarded for this with money or good words: "Greed is cool" and personal exposure obviously even more so.
Hence my conclusion that you have to think very carefully about which of these many commercial offers you ultimately use yourself, for what purpose and then how intensively? A little hint is allowed here: you don't have to and shouldn't fill out the given profiles completely; less is often much more.
"The medium is the message."
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964)
