I get a couple of LinkedIn invites a week from people I don’t know. I’m kind of at a loss for what I should do with them. It feels kind of slutty (in a social network kind of way) to accept them. At the same time I feel kind of bad rejecting them — they could be very nice people. In the end I think I have to ignore them or eventually the “random people who I don’t know” will totally eclipse people I actually know in my network. At the same time, I’ve never actually used my LinkedIn network so maybe I should try and collect as many connections as possible in case I can sell them on eBay someday. Now that I think about it, the only time I go to LinkedIn is when I get a connection request from, well, a random person.

Perhaps LinkedIn could introduce several different kinds of connections. Something like:

• Somebody I know and trust
• Somebody I know and don’t trust
• Somebody I know (and don’t know if I should trust or not)
• Somebody that randomly requested a connection that I accepted because I felt bad rejecting them

Even better would be if LinkedIn could introduce user rating, perhaps a on a scale of “slutty” to “super prude”, that is a ratio of invites sent to invites accepted. That might just be the kind of self regulating system that I need.