Continuing on from my recent remarks about the deterioration of LinkedIn, and my earlier thoughts on personal CRM as a non-LinkedIn, I’ve requested a download of my LinkedIn data. I wanted to take a look at what is included in it.
As I remembered from an earlier download the provided contact list contains the name, current role and date of connecting, but no links to the corresponding profiles. That renders the list of names more or less useless, if you would actually want to take your data and move on. However, going to the overview of my network on the LinkedIn site I can get my entire network shown in a single list. This overview used to be paginated, but now the network page is an endless scroll. It takes a bit of scrolling to go to the bottom of the list of a few thousand connections but then I had all my connections shown on a single page. Having saved that html file I can now strip out the links to profiles and add them to the list of connections in the data download. How I can make all that downloaded material useful as input for a personal CRM system is still an open but interesting question.