My friends and co-workers are just smurfs

I can remember back when I was young, having a fascination with collecting Smurfs. I don't remember the exact details, but I think you collected them at petrol/gas/service stations (maybe BP?). I had a fair amount (about 20+ I recall). I'd try and force my parents to constantly stop at the service station so I could get more. More, more, MORE!

Then one day (maybe a year or two later), I was sitting around looking at my box full of small blue bits of plastic, and I realised: I never really liked Smurfs anyway. Sure it was something to collect. But there were better things to collect. Things that I actually liked. Transformers comes to mind. :-)

So I had one of my first experiences of feeling tricked into collecting something that I didn't actually like, by clever marketing and snappy logos.

Time moves on, and now I'm starting to get the same feeling with LinkedIn. At the start, it seemed like a good idea (join a network of my friends and colleagues, find old workmates, get access to the "inside" job offerings). Inside the website you notice little "meters" that let you know "if you invite x more people, you will reach 90% complete". Mini-nags to remind you that you should spread LinkedIn to all your friends. Which is fine - it's viral marketing, I should know - I work for a company that does the same sort of thing.

But today I had a similar epiphany to the Smurfs (does that make it smurf-tacular?): I hate receiving emails along the lines of "join this website so you can do x". I get enough in spam, I don't want to receive the same thing from my friends. Yet here I am, sending emails to some of my closest friends, asking them to join a website they may never have heard of, just so I can get an extra little mark on my progress meter.

I'm not so disgruntled that I will immediately quit LinkedIn, and ask all my friends to do that same (besides, that's up to them). But I think I might leave it alone for a while (say a month or two) and see if I still feel as annoyed with myself (after all, it's me that sends the invites, not LinkedIn) as I do today.