unclear on the concept, #2

[waider]

Someone sent me an invite to Linked In, yet another social/business network. I declined the invite, and on the resulting trip to the front page I saw their search box:

People you know are already LinkedIn
There are 6 million professionals already on LinkedIn. Find the people you know:
[First Name] [LastName]

So out of curiousity, I entered the name of someone I figured would be in such a system, who happens to have an apostrophe in their surname. I got an error message: "Please use letters only to search (no numbers or special characters).". Nice going. I sincerely doubt that many technical people I know are using a site that doesn't know how to do a fuzzy search, or filter "numbers or special characters" out of a search.

Comments

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Or, for that matter, be incapable of handling punctuation in a name if the database is less than twenty years old.

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

I think I'll change my name to Elzadra M%$&Do&@ll

[eejitalmuppet.livejournal.com]

How do you pronounce that?

[wisn.livejournal.com]

'Throatwarbler-Mangrove'

[wisn.livejournal.com]

Incidentally, I occasionally get mail from LinkedIn. Only a couple individuals out of the maybe two dozen who've mailed me have been from names I can identify. The remainder are linkspams or probable MLMs.

I like the concept of an online business networking tool, but only the concept, because I can't think of any mechanism that would be sufficiently open to be useful while preventing regression to a very low norm of membership.