Massive LinkedIn IPO Raises Dotcom Bubble Concerns 169
The Installer writes with news of yesterday's stock offering from LinkedIn, which shocked investors by closing at more than double the initial price. "Buyers crowded the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and financial news networks flashed LinkedIn's stock price urgently all day. By the closing bell, the company had a market value of $9 billion, the highest for any Internet company since Google had its initial public offering seven years ago. Millionaires and even one billionaire were made, at least on paper. The stock, issued at $45, went as high as $122.70 just before noon and closed at $94.25 on a trading volume of 30 million shares." That price values the company at over 30 times its 2010 revenue, leading to speculation that this is either evidence of the second dotcom bubble (a possibility we discussed in February) or a "watershed moment for social media." Many experts are questioning the value of LinkedIn, while others are claiming intentional market manipulation.
LinkedIn (Score:3, Funny)
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Funny)
I agree. Though, for some reason, it seems that almost every CV/Resume on LinkedIn should end with "And the sun shines out my butt."
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)
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You think that would be a good addition to a resume? Hmm....
*rewrites resume*
Re:LinkedIn (Score:4, Funny)
If that is a listed skill on their resume, I WILL ask them to demonstrate during the interview.
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True, however, it could also be argued that they probably didn't become successful and prosper by being so easily influenced that they buy all the crap that advertisers push. If anything, the value of this is more the social network it creates than the advertising potential, in my opinion.
Word-of-mouth advertising is the best kind. It's always ideal when people will actually come looking for your product or service rather than you having to go out and find them.
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Value for whom, though? How does LinkdIn directly benefit from you having a professional network?
Apparently it allows them to sell a lot of stock.
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I dont care how valuable you think a professional is (I can hire a professional lawn mower who might not even know how to spell his own name) but there is still little to no value in these things outside of potential advertising, and data farming
which might be ok, personally I think that once one of these awesome valuable companies goes bust, their only assets, userdata will flood the market making it near worthless, then you can watch them all fall one after another as none of these "services" are really d
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There's tremendous value in linkedin as a recruiting tool, and they are already making good money off that aspect. I think they could be profitable on that alone in the long run.
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That's interesting. I get almost no spam. The offers I get from recruiters are generally very well matched to my published skills.
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Mod the parent up. If you join Linkedin but you don't want to contacted by recruiters at all, then you're an idiot. I get an email about once a week, and I thank the recruiter for contacting me but politely tell them that I'm not interested. They usually follow up by becoming a connection. I also turn off all updates from recruiters who are connected to me, so that I don't get bothered by them. However, all of the contacts from recruiters have been mostly on target.
One day, I'll probably get laid off o
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So ... you'll be exactly like me, except I didn't need to get spammed by cold calling recruiters to do so.
Do you think for some reason there will be no recruiters available to you if you AREN'T on LinkedIn?
I'm guessing you think recruiters are some form of special person that finds 'talent' ... the reality of it is, recruiters are nothing more than head hunters, your relationship with them is irrelevant, you're nothing more than a resume. Any friendliness they show to you is simply to ensure they make the
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First rule of the Web, don't ever reply to anything that you don't want. I bet you paste random scripts into your web browser whilst you are logged into facebook too. I guess with gullible morons flooding the on-line world there is probably plenty of money to be made off of them by simple con jobs like Linkedin. Just because we get prurient pleasure from watching wannabe jerks exposing their sordid personalities on television doesn't mean that you will become a superstar by exposing your life on-line - beca
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)
I never bothered to join linkedin, but I know a few people who have recently quit because they kept getting spam from recruiters as a result of their linkedin profile. Lots of recruiters seem to be doing very rough matches based on published skills and sending them messages about jobs that they're neither interested in nor qualified for.
That's stupid, quitting linkedin over unsolicited recruiters e-mails (not to mention probably false - about knowing people that have quit over the spam.) It's like I know this guy who went to Iraq and he knows of a ex-marine that has a tracking chip implanted on his ass. Same. Lame. As for quitting Linkedin for receiving unsolicited recruiter emails, that's like quitting going to a nudie bar because you are getting too many erections. I mean, the whole point of being in linkedin is to increase one's exposure to recruiters and potential job-related connections. What were these people thinking they were going to get when they joined in? How do you spell "duh!"?
Personally, I don't get that many, maybe 12 a week. I mostly ignore them, but once in a while I do read and *gasp* "connect" to one of them.
It is an excellent tool for what it is intended to. And though some of the technical discussion forums are moronic, there are quite a few that have been quite valuable. I've been able to keep track of past colleagues (some of them that I have not seen in over a decade) as they move from company to company. When I was unemployed about two years ago, it was through LinkedIn that I re-connected a long-lost contact who pointed me up to a couple of job opportunities. I personally got contacted by a long-lost contact from grad school that I pointed out to an ex-employer that had a job opening. Those are just two real-life examples.
Just one more arsenal for keeping one's professional network, stuff that only the stupid/overconfident can ignore. These tools, like anything else in the so-called "new media" (I hate that term), they are what you make of them. And what you make of them is more a function of who you are than anything else.
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You have to look at it from the other side, trying to fill jobs. You can look up resumes of a lot of really great people at linkedin. The ones who are not actively looking are pretty obvious. So you send them an invite, and wait to hear back. You hear back, you tell them about the opportunity, and hopefully proceed. The good people all have jobs, but that doesn't mean you can't convince them to make a change with enough money/other compensation.
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There might be a hundred sites that do that, but LinkedIn is the only one I'm on, and the only one I've heard of.
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They make 1/3rd of their gross on helping recruiting now. My claim is only that I think that is a viable business all by itself. Think of them as the #1 worldwide recruiting firm. Forget the advertising or the data-mining, they can build a sustainable business on that alone.
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there is still little to no value in these things outside of potential advertising, and data farming
Can't agree with you, I've had offers based solely on my LinkedIn profile.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe 5 years ago, but since then it's become a useless collection of unemployed strangers giving referrals to other unemployed strangers, and a collection of spam posters.
Almost nobody keeps their profile up to date, because the vast majority of its "users" don't even bother to use it any more.
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That might be what your network looks like, but mine certainly isn't. (might also depend on where you live, cause if there's 30% unemployement rate, those who joins will most probably be the unemployed, while the employed don't really need to keep it up)
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I keep mine with an updated title...but don't really have a description. I can't bring myself to write one of those self-promotional 3 paragraph descriptions of how wonderful I am....It just seems so forced. I can manage it in a cover letter (especially since then I can focus on skills that are relevant to the position I am applying for) bu
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Interesting)
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Maybe 5 years ago, but since then it's become a useless collection of unemployed strangers giving referrals to other unemployed strangers, and a collection of spam posters.
Almost nobody I KNOW OR ARE PROFESSIONALLY RELATED/CONNECTED TO keeps their profile up to date, because the vast majority of its "users" don't even bother to use it any more.
There, fixed that for you.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Interesting)
LinkedIn may have a "valuable user base" but does it have an active one? How much time do people spend on LinkedIn? I have a LinkedIn account and I log in maybe once every few months to accept invitations. It's a resume with references attached. It's invaluable when you're searching for jobs, but it's not a true social site.
My point is that yes, you could use the information you have for me to direct highly effective advertisements at me - but only when I'm logged in.
Facebook, people are logged in every waking second it seems like. It's their email, their IM, their message board - it's their life, not just their resume.
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This.
I joined LinkedIn back in 2003 when I was laid off. I hardly use it except to update professional connections, in the event that ever happens again.
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I agree with every word you say. Linkedin is only something you use when you are bored and take a look to see if any old work collegues are still around. Does anyone seriously think that they can make money out of this dead web site? I look for work on jobs sites, Linkedin is just a way of keeping track of people you used to work with in different industries. Its a huge joke.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone on LinkedIn isn't a professional ... they're salespeople, selling themselves ...
Whether actually a salesman, attorney, real estate agent, consultant, or whatever ... it's just an advertisement for that person and their services.
Would you want to buy a list of people that are willing to publicly sell themselves?
There are terms for that, I think "Streetwalker" is one of the more polite ones.
Wait, I can buy a list of streetwalker's names, numbers, and services ... holy crap, you're right, it's a gold mine!
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The difference is, these high income users are less likely to be influenced by targeted advertisement and have less to draw from data mining wise than Joe Schmo on facebook. Joe Schmo is who the money is made off of on advertisement and data mining.
And, even if linkedin has a "valuable" user database, the site itself is mostly a joke. Lots of people doing very little and visiting infrequently.
Re:LinkedIn (Score:4, Interesting)
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The value of facebook, like the value of typicalTV, is that it targets kids and young adults whose future buying patterns can be more easily influenced
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Thanks for signing up to tell us this Mr. Shill.
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Re:LinkedIn (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I must be visiting the wrong parts. At least the web development sections of it are filled with Indians showing exactly why outsourcing web development is a bad idea. The skill level is appalling.
I tried to use it for a while but there seems little point. The jobs offered are often "we post on a world wide forum but only want people within walking distance".
The tech discussion are often some Indian guy asking "what quickest way to do X without understanding anything". The bits of India that do space development are not on LinkedIn.
There is a lot of hype around the site but what is it delivering? At best it could become some kind of global job board with all of the problems of advertisers not properly restricting their ads from reaching everyone. Already think it is annoying that ads from other parts of the country come up? How about other continents?
It is big but what is its actual use? That is what has killed previous bubble companies. Not a lack of size but a lack of actual real world use that people want to pay for. Take the old one of home delivery. I got a home, I work during the day, so a delivery service that comes by would be useful. Useful but not economical. Lot of companies tried the
Re:LinkedIn (Score:5, Interesting)
LinkedIn may have started out that way, but at this point its more or less another Monster.com with a friends network.
Everyone is on LinkedIn, it is no longer a sign of a higher quality professional. It means nothing any more.
The only thing you can be sure about someone on LinkedIn is that they are being spammed by LinkedIn's useless emails on a regular basis.
There are far cheaper ways to obtain a list of email addresses.
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Just give me one year... (Score:3, Funny)
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6mo tops. There's already a large correction coming and it's going to hurt. I'm making money as fast as I can to buffer against it.
But, you know, I *had* to buy in (Score:2)
There was this post on LinkedIn about how much money this was going to make for everybody!
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You are SO stuck in the 20th century. Haven't you heard? "Money" is completely obsolete. I heard about it on all the Gawker Media websites yesterday -- BitCoin [lifehacker.com] is here!
Nah, there's no new dotcom bubble. Everything's fine! I'm going to go spend some Flooz on a stock option or two.
Gee I don't Know (Score:3)
Bubble? Yeah.
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Well It Sure Set the Bar for Creepy (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't hard to get the e-mails to stop but I'd wager that shell of a profile is out there floating around linking my old coworkers in a web -- for any of them that added that profile or had one of the e-mail addresses in their book. At the time, no one seemed to find this alarming but me so whatever. And now Facebook and a lot of sites will harvest your address book for you from Hotmail or whatever and then it will aggressively market that person to come to said social networking site on your behalf. Each site wants to boast fifty billion users (or some factor higher than living human beings), right?
But LinkedIn is really outpacing those sites: an outlook plugin/hijacker [linkedin.com], drupal integration [drupal.org], actually a plugin for virtually anything [linkedin.com] and of course APIs [linkedin.com] to put it in your site.
So I was wondering what had gone wrong when I heard about its IPO the other day. After all, it's one of the creepiest spammiest social networking sites I've encountered. But that's just it, its methods are effective and so it is rewarded. If privacy abuser Facebook is "worth" the yearly GDP of a small nation, surely a website implementing the same APIs and plugins while experimenting with creepin' it up a notch is going to drive investors crazy. I think it's more a sign of overvaluation of a privacy abuse bubble--one I've been hoping to see pop for quite sometime now.
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The part of LinkedIn that creeps me out is whenever (strangers) people I have had zero professional contact with contact me out of the blue to add them to my network. Or friends that are out of my professional life context annoyed that I won't add them. I am a programmer, I don't mind adding other programmers, project managers I have worked with in the past, that kind of thing, but adding a cousin or a friend that work in unrelated fields is just stupid. It completely defeats the purpose of the site.
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The part of LinkedIn that creeps me out is whenever (strangers) people I have had zero professional contact with contact me out of the blue to add them to my network.
I think they call that a "sales personality"
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Generally speaking, I agree with what you wrote. I try to only connect with people on LinkedIn with whom I've had a professional experience. That said, I do have some connections through family members in different industries, and those have come in handy a few times. You never know where your next job will come from, after all. Just because you're a programmer doesn't mean an accountant or salesman can't hear about a potential opening in your field down the road.
I have an account (Score:2)
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Facebook for personal, LinkedIn for business (Score:3)
And I never use it. I don't even know what it's for. It's like a limited purpose version of facebook.
The purpose of LinkedIn is to isolate two networks, one for friends and family and one for business and professional. When a co-worker, boss or other professional contact asks for or gives a facebook invite you should redirect them to linkedin. That way professional/business contacts do not see the pics from the weekend partying with your friends.
We have two lives, the fun/personal and the serious/professional. It makes sense to have separate social networks too. As a matter of fact in our minds we alrea
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I'm not quite buying the argument that it's easier to have them on two sites. What if you say don't want all your family to see your pics? Oh, "Familybook" for family, except maybe some likeminded ones actually go as friends as well. And maybe you have study mates that kinda fall inbetween, they're not really "professional" contacts yet you don't want them to see all the partying you do on the side so it's back to the original "Yearbook" style of Facebook. And maybe some things you'd share with the boys but
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And maybe some things you'd share with the boys but isn't exactly a killer with the opposite sex. And the opposite sex can also be a big bag of complications too.
That actually just caused the thought to occur to me that now I'm going to make "M" and "F" friends lists and sort all my friends into their respective friends list. No idea if I'll ever restrict a post by one of those categories, but it'll be neat to have it there if I want it.
It'd be nice to be able to just use their listed gender to sort them but some people have no gender or the wrong gender listed - for what reasons I can't imagine.
Trusting today's facebook policy ... (Score:2)
... I add my aunt as my *family*, my buddy as *friend* and my colleague as "work". Family sees pics from family, friends see pics from friends and work doesn't see anything at all. If I post myself I pick what social circles it's for ...
And what about pics that other people post? What happens when they tag you? Do their pics inherit your settings or do you have to manually do something? Even if it is automatically inherited or easy to set manually you are one facebook policy change away from losing that. Given facebook's history I think putting people on a separate network may be more prudent.
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And what about pics that other people post? What happens when they tag you? Do their pics inherit your settings
That was the idea, yes. If a friend tags me in his photo, only my friends see it. If a family member tags me in his photo, only my family see it - unless I adjust the permissions so other groups can see it. I think that covers most use cases for me without intervention, family pics is shared with family and party pics with friends.
At the top level it'd be almost as if you have separate accounts "Kjella the friend", "Kjella the family member", "Kjella the study buddy", "Kjella the colleague" and by default t
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Seriously, few things we are doing today are going to be unfamiliar to the older generations of our families.
True, but parenting usually involves trying to cover it up to be good role models and growing up means breaking limits without telling. And while friends are friends, family can be so many things of all ages from your grandaunt to your kid cousin, close and distant. Yet they'd probably all be insulted if you turned them down as being kin.
And you should not underestimate the parents that swing the pendulum, because they were crazy in youth they go prude as parents, now that they're older and "wiser". And the
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Now, whether it's $9 billion (or more) worth of company + potential is another thing. The $4 billion offering price was already pretty ambitious; a $9 billion price assumes all the best-case growth scenarios for years to come. It's still possible that it's a bet that will pay off! But it's a risky on
Once... (Score:2)
Bubble bubble upon the wall (Score:5, Insightful)
The amazing thing about these economic bubbles is that they continue to inflate even though virtually all participants know they're engaging in a bubble. This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it
Re:Bubble bubble upon the wall (Score:5, Insightful)
This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it.
The thing is, as bad as bubbles are for the system, for each individual caught up in them in modern times they are very much a winning proposition, for a bunch of reasons:
1. For almost all of them, there is a greater fool out there. For instance, on the bad subprime mortgage market, Goldman Sachs made darn sure that when it hit the fan that all of it was propelled in the direction of AIG.
2. If a bubble breaks, you're likely to get bailed out by Uncle Sam if you're big enough and stupid enough, so you really have nothing to worry about.
3. Even if your company has gone under, thanks to limited liability the person making the decision to buy bubble assets knows they won't be penalized too much by the loss.
4. Thanks to most corporate cultures in big Wall St firms, if you ever play it on the safe side and react to a bubble by staying out of it, you'll be penalized a great deal for performing below the market during the bubble.
So game theory gives our fund manager 2 options with some theoretical payoffs:
1. Play it safe: +10, or
2. Buy into the bubble: 90% chance of +100 / 10% chance of +0.
Any rational fund manager picks option 2.
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Of course, with regard to 2, if a big company and I wind up being the greatest fool and lose real big, what happens is that some of my tax dollars go to bailing out the company.
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And right up until the actual pop, they're right. And they can make money as long as they aren't the biggest fool.
I belive 30 Rock summed up my view quite nicely. (Score:5, Funny)
"He's on LinkedIn, Lemon. He might as well be dead." -Jack Donaghy
Facebook for people with no social lives (Score:2)
Ok, I'm a big fan of networking with people. It's probably led to every job I've ever had.
But, it doesn't get around the fact the LinkedIn SUCKS. I mean, do you really want to drag your job into your social media? Hell no. Connecting with friends = fun. Connecting with friends you happen to work with = fun. Connecting with that brown-nosing, tattletale bitch down the hall = not fun. So, as almost useful of a purpose LinkedIn serves, it will never outgrow what it already is. It's hopes, dreams and as
No, to separate social life from business life (Score:2)
So, as almost useful of a purpose LinkedIn serves, it will never outgrow what it already is. It's hopes, dreams and aspirations are limited. ... This valuation is definitely bullshit.
Absolutely agreed.
Oh, you want me to post a status update about how I drank a case of beer and pissed on the neighbor's lawn? Maybe on Facebook, certainly not on LinkedIn.
That summarizes the reason for LinkedIn. It's not as your original subject line suggested, a social network for people with no social lives. Rather it is a social network for those who do not need to be aware of your social life. We already categorize people as friends or business contacts in our minds and in our real world social networks, it makes sense to have separate online social networks to match.
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What linkedin does, as far as I'm concerned, is get me relevant interview offers. A surprisingly relevant, amazing flood of interview offers. Jobs that, frankly, would be difficult for me to find searching painfully through something like monster/dice/jobs, if they are even advertised on those sites any more. Instead of me finding jobs, the jobs find me. Since I have little interest in being an expert job finder, I think it's great.
You don't get it do you? (Score:2)
It is not meant to be facebook. Not everyone think social means getting pissed, that you do... well that says a lot about you.
I don't think LinkedIn has the capacity to reach the full potential of the idea which by itself is simple:
A global public job board.
Facebook for you social profile, LinkedIn for your professional one. There are a LOT of companies in need of skilled people but only really recruiting in a very small section of the world. Despite airtravel making the entire world a single day away and l
Bring it on (Score:2)
Either use LinkedIn or pay recruiters big $ (Score:2)
I know of two companies that saved a lot of cash by mining LinkedIn for filling vacant positions rather than paying the standard commission rates they used to pay recruiters (a placement fee of between 25 and 30 percent of the associate's starting yearly salary). Firms *hate* paying recruiters. In fact, some HR people hate recruiters on a professional and a personal level.
There used to be good money in recruiting. If a big chuck of recruiting money moves to LinkedIn, that's a tidal wave of change. I
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Your observations are correct, but I might add that the quality of the recruiters that reach out to me from my LinkedIn profile are lazy, unprofessional, and apparently can't read my details.
Case in point. I am a product manager. A good one. Been doing it a long time. But I am a SW or instrumentation guy. Lately, I keep getting hit with inquiries for medical devices (you know, FDA certification, GLP, and other things), stuff that is clearly NOT in my history. It takes a 5 minute conversation to conv
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The lazy and unprofessional ones in your example are the HR people who are letting "can't read" recruiters surf LinkedIn instead of looking through LinkedIn themselves. Few companies have the cash to waste on that arrangement.
Recruiters used to have their own pool of qualified people, created by years of professional networking, that was unreachable to hiring companies. That is the value that recruiters brought to the companies. If recruiters are only going to search the same candidate pool that compani
removing accounts.. (Score:2)
For the record, I am at 3 months, and still waiting for the email that will have a link that will let me finish the account removal page of Linked In. (you will be getting an email in the next 24 hours......) Nobody cares there.. I mark every single one of their emails as spam, just to make me feel better...
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In the meantime, have you replaced the entire profile with something off FakeNameGenerator?
I dont get it (Score:2)
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Why would anyone want an account on Facebook? More importantly, how on earth is Facebook going to make any money? Ever? Who are the idiots investing in this garbage?
That's what a lot of people were saying a few years back.
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Still saying that now, really.
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Re:I dont get it (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not investment. It's speculation.
The only investors are ignorant of the lack of genuine value of LinkedIn. (Which is much less than their original price.)
The majority of the people are looking to get rich off of the hype and dump the stock ASAP.
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It's really simple:
Create a site that chases a fad, get a decent-sized following by any means necessary (usually by providing some nearly-useless service and spamming it all over the place), don't ever let anyone out of it (keep those numbers up!), convince a bunch of speculators that it is solid gold just waiting to be dug up, IPO, live high on the hog while the speculators eat each other buying and selling your vapor, then either sell out to some other starry-eyed wannabee who has more money than sense (o
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--To get a job.
More importantly, how on earth is Linked in going to make any money? Ever? --Employer accounts are expensive. LinkedIn makes money off these accounts. Not to mention advertising.
Who are the idiots investing in this garbage? --All the initial investors and IPO buyers just made a lot of money.
Professionals, LinkedIn and spam (Score:2)
While I understand the concept, I have yet to really find the value. I actually have more client asking me how they ended up on Linkedin and how to get off of it than I do ones asking how to join. What usually ends up happening is one of their clients or contacts sends out Linkedin requests (usually unknowingly) and they more often than not sign up thinking its a legitimate request and some way to exchange documents or keep in contact, the result seems to be spam semi related to their business. I myself
Everyone is missing the real point (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be obvious that the "public" stock markets are a crooked casino run by the investment banks. They own the cops; all the alphabet agencies that claim to "regulate" trading activity. They own all the politicians, who make the laws that determine whether illicit activity is permitted. They even own the Supreme Court, who says a batch of numbers controlled by an oligarchy is a human being in the eyes of the law and the courts. If you're a single person who raises a flag, the SEC will freeze your assets and try to haul you into court. If you're big enough to be a Madoff, then you get to run your scam until you piss off the wrong people. If you're Goldman Sachs, you're untouchable.
The "public" stock market is meaningless. Its not even where all the "big" action is happening. All the real money making is in the derivatives floor. And most of that are private transactions between banks. That doesn't even include the shadow stock market located outside of NY. That's the place where thousands of transactions are being made at hundredths of a second. What is the economic utility in making trading decisions faster than 1 second, before a human being can even initiate a buy/sell decision? And finally, the real money is made on the commodities floor, where collusion between the oil companies, investment banks, and high end speculators can drive up the price of consumer oil by $1/gal. in the middle of an oil GLUT.
Who gives a damn about Linkedin getting an overvalued IPO? The "public" stock market is meaningless compared the trading activity happening outside of the exchanges. The Facebook IPO didn't even happen on the trading floor! It was a "private" sale to avoid gov't regulators. The NYSE significance is trivial to the global economy. That's why the US gov't is going to allow it to be bought by foreign owners. You can pore through company statements, do your due diligence, read the Wall Street Journal, it doesn't matter. What you and the peons think a company's valuation and quality of its leadership is irrelevant. It'll get wiped down to peanuts by the single flick of an unreported derivatives trade.
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You are right about one thing: there is a glut of oil.
You are wrong about something else: the prices are not going up, they are falling.
What? What did I say?
The prices for oil are falling. They are falling in real money. In gold and silver the prices of oil are lowest they have ever been in history right now.
1 US dime (10 cents), minted prior to 1968 costs about 4 USD. 1 gallon of gas in US costs about 4 USD.
The cheapest gas on the record in USA was 25 cents. Today gas is cheaper than that (though they don'
Companies with ~$10B market cap (Score:2)
Other companies that have ~$10B valuation: Cablevision, Whole Foods, Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, NYSE, Dr Pepper/Snapple, Clorox, Mattel.
I would purchase any of these companies, which are all profitable, before I would purchase LinkedIn. LinkedIn is clearly overvalued and I suspect people will get burned within the next 3 months. There's also the risk of facebook killing this company in one fell swoop just like they killed Digg with their Like button and that risk is not reflected in the company's valu
Pffff...VA Linux IPO was better (Score:2)
VA Linux IPO'd in December 2010 with an opening price of $30. That price skyrocketed to over $300 during the day and closed at $240.
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I think you mean December 1999.
Get Off My Lawn! (Score:2)
Double the initial price? That's nothing. Back in my day, we hit TEN TIMES our initial stock price. Even our Friends and Family were millionaires!
Go burst your wussy little bubble wanna-be somewhere else and away from my azaleas.
Damn kids.
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That's a solid point, this site is likely to get more valuable in the near future when the current bubble in the equities market pops. Same for the housing market, the price of houses has gone down a lot, but it still hasn't hit the kind of rock bottom prices that were needed to get rid of the bubble. In the mean time Wall Street firms are making out like thieves borrowing at virtually 0% and lending that money back the US government at 3-4%.
It's going to get really ugly in the near future.
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I don't know where you live, but housing prices just can't get any lower here in Florida. Housing prices are currently under what they were in the mid 90s for a large portion of the state. It's not that difficult to find a 3 bedroom / 2000 sqft house for $75-85k.
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Can I get ocean front (not view!) with good quality for that yet? I really want a nice retirement home, and I have about that much to spare.
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I have no clue about beach front, but with the space program pretty much closing up, now's the time to start looking in the space coast area if you're interested.
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Overall equity valuations are reasonably close to their historical P/E ratios, and company profits have been growing fairly well over the past couple of years. It is very unlikely that there is an equity bubble right now.
Housing prices are have tremendous local variation. Some areas have probably already bottomed, others are still on the way down.
Wall Street firms holding US Government debt are insane. There is a real bubble in US Treasuries which will soon drive the value of these bonds down. Bond experts
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No short selling..... (Score:2)
Saddly you can't short sell the stock for the first 30 days.
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Yeah I'm sad that I didn't make any money on this one. Maybe in another decade another one will come around, but my dreams of owning a sports car while young are dashed :-(
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I will never let my mother live down the time when I asked her to float me a couple grand to buy domain names when I was in school in the mid 90's.
Oh well, I guess the lesson is to make sure you always have plenty of extra cash laying around if you plan on making plenty of extra cash.
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