A few years ago, someone sent me a request to join LinkedIn which is essentially a business networking social site. I reluctantly joined and had about two “connections” with one from the person who sent me the link and one other friend that joined the network.

I had pretty much forgotten about the site but a few months ago I started getting a trickle of requests from former co-workers to join networks. It was fun to exchange e-mails with former co-workers that I hadn’t heard from in a while to catch up.

At first, it was co-workers from my last employer, then from a previous employer, then from an employer from 10 years ago! I’m now getting at least one or two e-mails per day from people wanting to join networks. I’m getting requests from people I’ve never met before too! It’s not sales people asking to join my network either, it’s people simply looking for a lead in to get their foot in the door.

My network is pretty funny though because I have links to CEO’s, legal counsels, directors, vice presidents down to clerks and I can only surmise that things are getting really bad in the job market now to be getting requests out of the woodwork from so many people. There are now some supposed 80,000 people in my nested network and I can’t imagine ever connecting with so many people!

I’m now hooked on trying to determine an algorithm for my newly created “LinkedIn Desperation Exponential Ratio” which will track the rate of growth of requests on a per month basis of linking requests.

I might create a new category for it! Be on the look out.