Weirdos and Greedheads in Cyberspace

Admittedly I'm on too many social networking websites. Linkedin is one of the more useful and professional among them. Recently, I received and invitation to connect from a guy who went to the same design school as me. I connected and checked his profile, which heavily promotes a couple books he's written. Sort of heavy handed, but Linkedin is business, self promotion oriented.

Not long afterward, I received another invitation to connect from a guy who is connected to the first guy. Red flags were popping up everywhere with this guy. According to his profile, he's a casting agent and talent agent at his own company. When I clicked on the link to his company, Top Linked came up. I googled his current and past and companies and found nothing. Further reading in his profile proved to be entertaining. According to it, he's been involved in the entertainment industry for the past 12 years. Nothing wrong with that. But under education, he went to Yale and is "Dr., Physics, Doctor of Medicine, 1990 – 1996." What?

His interests include "flying my plane, my 10 kids, women olllala am very hot, all kind of sport, bookwriting,and many many more, ask me"

This can't be real.

So I keep going back to the Top Linked site. Which proves to be entertaining as well. It's just a fast way to "make connections" for the sake of making connections. And paying a membership to do so. The top connector has over 40,000 connections. At that level, it's no longer personal. It's either a) just seeing how many connections they can make, or more likely b) collecting information to sell to any and all interested parties.