The main benefit of keeping my LinkedIn contacts visible, as Chris Alden put it, is “showing who you know helps place you in a community and can therefore help with networking.” But I’d been curious if there was some benefit to hiding your contacts unbeknownst to me. I noticed that a small percentage of my contacts had inaccessible contact lists. Was there a secret social motivation for enabling that privacy setting?
I decided to do a little survey and see if there was any common aim. To my surprise, survey responses from each of my non-sharing contacts trickled in expressing more or less the same sentiment as Scott McMullen:
When I signed up for LinkedIn the default was “not shared” and I didn’t know you could share them… I’ve since discovered they’re [shareable] and haven’t bothered to go back and share them. Mostly laziness, combined with the unclear benefit of listing them.
Looking over the lot, I can see that all of these folks probably were LinkedIn trailblazers. At some point after my seemingly-private contacts registered, LinkedIn must have realized the utility of opening up the privacy default (and the futility of expecting users to tweak it).
So, the reality turned out to be completely unrelated to social networking practices. In the end, the whole mystery goes down as nothing more than a quirk of default-preference history.
Ironically, I mentioned to Alden a few months ago that the default on Rojo should be to have your contacts public to accelerate the growth of the Rojo social network. He was skeptical.