By Dennis D. McDonald

Today I received a LinkedIn connection recommendation for a beloved neighbor who died more than five years ago. Her email address pops up now and then, as does the yellowing Rolodex card for her (and her late husband) we still maintain in our kitchen by the anachronistic-but-still-useful landline phone.

I wasn’t at all spooked by Eleanor’s appearance in my LinkedIn stream. She was a dear friend and seeing her name brought a smile to my lips.

It did make me wonder about how many dead people are covered in LinkedIn’s database and how many are included in my own list of connections.

Perhaps it’s not in Linkedin’s advantage to look too closely at this issue as it uses member numbers in its own promotional and pricing efforts.

That’s fine with me. Everyone’s got to make a living. I’m sure the recent purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft made some people very happy (and wealthy) without getting overly concerned about whether Linkedin’s signal to noise ratio is getting smaller or larger.

I have always tended to be a quality over quantity person myself. After many years I view LinkedIn as sort of a necessary evil. Most of the connection requests I get anymore tend to come from people I don’t know or from what I suspect are fake accounts. Since I rarely use LinkedIn much as a serious networking tool that’s probably to be expected. As the man says, “You reap what you sow.”

As I don’t actively use LinkedIn much as a serious networking tool that’s probably to be expected. Plus, my Linkedin news stream increasingly looks like Facebook with images and content of little professional interest. These days I’m finding Google+ to be a more fine-tuned and flexible networking tool where it’s much more likely I’ll run into someone who shares my eclectic interests.

So, seeing a dead neighbor showed up in Linkedin doesn’t really concern me. It is a sobering and bittersweet reminder of the mortality we all face as we strive to make sure something good survives after we’re gone. It’s that “legacy” thing, you know. Like it or not, LinkedIn is part of it.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Dennis D. McDonald