The Business of Software

This is simply an anecdote.

I just received a LinkedIn invitation.

The sender was a guy who attempted to sell me a "cheap" copy of Delphi Enterprise via Ebay about three years ago. His ad asserted that it was an unregistered, non academic, unused license. He had about 20 positive feedbacks.

I never received it. I did get a UPS notice of "received billing instructions", but that only indicates that someone transmitted information to UPS, not a physical package.

The item I finally did receive was a squalidly hand addressed and sloppily taped envelope with a hand written "Invoice" on a sheet of notebook paper inside, and what appeared to be a CD burned with a demo copy of Delphi downloaded from Borland's web site.  It basically looked like a practical joke.

I told the guy that I was going to contact his state's attorney general and the US Post Office and claim mail fraud. He then emailed me saying that he was having "problems" with his "distributor".

About a week later I received a refund through Paypal.

But still...!!!

I could be his LinkedIn buddy.

You'd have to be pretty hard up for "friends" to accept that one:)

You should sign up, just so you can share your experience with his other buddys

What I am curious about is this guy's thinking. As far as I know, you have to go into LinkedIn and manually enter an email address and send each person an invitation. I never saw a way to spam out requests to a list of addresses.

I suppose that he had my email address mistakenly in a list with his actual business contacts and just started sending requests.

Do people use LinkedIn as a business or networking tool? Or do most people just collect connections on LinkedIn like baseball cards? It appears the latter.

Ok, I never paid attention to the "Reject" option in LinkedIn. They have an option for attaching a note. I just wrote an explanation to refresh the guy's memory... LOL.

Maybe he wants the CD back? :)

He probably used a plug in to scan his mailbox and send an invite to anyone on it. 

If memory serves, there is an option to limit by LinkedIn members.  That's probably what happened.

Actually there is way right in Linked in to import your contacts.  I pulled all my gmail accounts in but a good 90% are crap from people I responded to an email once or received emails from that weren't marked spam.  So, you do have to be careful using that feature. :P  I bet that's what this guy did and just didn't bother to try and remember who was who and just invited everybody on his list.