This weekend was action-packed and a lot of fun. On Friday night, Abbie, Jack and I watched The Empire Strikes Back. We watched "the first one" a couple weeks ago; their first "grown up" movie to-date. They're loving the series, especially because they recognize people from the previous movie. They're really looking forward to the next one because Wicket is in it. Believe it or not, I still have a stuffed Wicket from when I was a kid.
On Saturday, we started the day off right at Andrew Swanson's 5th birthday party. Following that, we hit up Pirates Cove and its adjacent petting zoo and train ride.
Today, we woke up, had some blueberry pancakes, drove to the bait shop and then headed to Golden Gate Canyon State Park. The weather was beautiful and Kriley Pond was a nice fishing spot. We didn't catch anything, but both kids are getting a lot better at casting. The highlight was the live worms we bought at the bait shop. Both Abbie and Jack were convinced they were the biting kind.
Next fun trip: An overnight camping trip on Father's Day. Location TBD.
I recently updated my status on LinkedIn to read:
Matt is determined not to have 500+ connections. Will start removing connections soon.
A couple of days later, I received the following message from a connection:
I noticed the other day you mentioned that you are determined to not have over 500 LinkedIn connections. I'm wondering what the reason is? Not just because LinkedIn shows 500+ after that, is it? As you work for LinkedIn, I assume there's some other reason. I'm interested to know what it is...
I joined LinkedIn May 27, 2003, 22 days after it initially launched. For the first few years, I accepted invitations when I received them. Some folks I knew, some I didn't. When I started consulting for LinkedIn last summer, I had somewhere between 200 and 300 connections. Most of them were people who had contacted me, not folks I had contacted.
One day, I used the import webmail contacts feature to pull in my contacts from Gmail. My number of connections quickly jumped by 100 and it's increased quite a bit since then (mostly due to co-workers from LinkedIn). Of the almost 500 connections I have, I believe there's a good 100-200 of them that are folks I don't know, have never had contact with, and will likely never benefit from being "connected" with.
I guess the main reason I'm planning on trimming my connections is to make my network higher quality. I admit I'm somewhat motivated by the 500+ icon, but it's also a genuine feeling that there's quite a few folks I won't benefit from being connected to. I'm not a LION after all. I believe my LinkedIn network should resemble my real-world network.
What's your opinion? Should I have folks in my network that know me, but I don't know them?
