LinkedIn Needs to Disintermediate Itself

I love LinkedIn.  There is no better way in the world to get business done than through relationships and LinkedIn couldn't have built a better nor prettier way to discover them.

Yet I  find it downright annoying that LinkedIn wants to participate in the actual brokering of relationships. There is something disturbing about receiving an html email from a friend (or not) which is one part from the friend and five parts telling me what to do next, despite the friendly Q&A at the bottom like "What's an introduction?".  Despite the brilliance of the underlying service (Who's in my network?), it seems to me that LinkedIn has to find a way to stay out of the way.  I almost always avoid it when I do find a connection, instead choosing to send a note directly to the friend to see what he knows about the person who knows the person I want to talk to.  That may sound a bit high schoolish but I'm guessing I'm not much different than anyone else.   LinkedIn needs to act less like the mother at the school dance and more like the limo driver waiting to take you to the next party.

I do think LinkedIn deserves to find ways to make money and grow its services, but I am confident that no great business believes that it deserves anything from its customers.   That's why I shouldn't have to take the bad with the good, and LinkedIn is going to have to find ways to build on the underlying service in a way that shows real value for users without intermediation.  In the spirit of constructive criticism, I was going to write some ideas for LinkedIn but decided to do a blog search to save time.  Here's one recent post I found  that the team at LinkedIn should be reading.