In the LinkedIn profile settings is an innocuous looking option: “Twitter Settings: Add your Twitter account on your profile.” Whatever you do, don’t do it. LinkedIn says “It’s easy, and takes only a few seconds” and gives these advantages. You can:
- Display Twitter on your LinkedIn profile
- Share Twitter messages with your LinkedIn contacts or groups
- Share LinkedIn jobs, news, and more on Twitter
This is what happens in practice:
Yes, anyone who was a professional contact of mine on LinkedIn who receives email updates got an update about my tweet that said “I have deleted my last blog post as having anal at the top of my homepage didn’t look good.”
The reason for that tweet is that I was exploring (for work reasons, honestly) how Google Instant treated rude words (answer: illogically). Tweets I sent that day included:
- The good thing about Google Instant is that I can discuss how it blocks funbags and jubblies from showing instant results.
- Google Instant allows stinky hitler but not dirty sanchez.
- The vagina monologues don’t get a Google Instant result. But coon does. ching chong is OK, but ching chong chinaman not. Any logic to this?
- Yes – it’s on a par with “soapy tit wank” in google’s eyes RT @edpmary @malcolmcoles Does Google still abhor the word “clitoris”?
Blog posts that resulted from this included:
- Google puts the anal into analytics – about how when you type analytics, Google Instant doesn’t fire up results when you get as far as typing anal.
- Google Instant filters put gay and lesbian on a par with rape, racism and paedophilia- which tried to make a serious point about the messages Google was sending out with its differing treatment of language – with its filters allowing paki jokes and kiddie fiddler searches but censoring ones about lesbians and funbags.
- Instant’s filters misfiring on video search pointed out the filters on video search were hopeless.
Anyway, in the context of these blog posts, and on Twitter itself (once I explained what I was doing), the tweets made sense. Sent to people in a LinkedIn email update with no context, they must have looked completely unprofessional. And possibly like I was really a 13-year old. Or a pornographer.
So: unhook your Tweets from your LinkedIn profile.
Oh, and to make matters worse – that screenshot above? It’s from an email my mum received.
