What is in a 'LinkedIn' brand

The news that LinkedIn is opening its doors to 14 year olds is odd.

Techcrunch has made fun of it, but I wonder if that applies to us all?

Over the last few years, I have found this service useful. It has the advantage of allowing users to be selective and to manage contacts easily.

The thought of hoards of teens wanting to build networks with a business community is daunting but the critical issue is whether such a facility devalues the LinkedIn brand.

I think it does and the Techcrunch imagery shows why.

For sure, LinkedIn will now need to have the equivalent of Google Circles to allow those of us who use the service to coral our stakeholders - or perhaps we will just have to migrate to G+

Meantime, as the BBC is suggesting, there are other issues that will make life tough for the web service. It is one thing curating a web site and communications network for adults and mostly business people but, as Ask.fm has found out, it is another dimention of management again to curate for the whole population.

Some of us are working on automated curation for such services but we are some way off a perfected capability.