Engineering social networking

Social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook are now many people’s window to the world, replacing e-mail and Usenet Newsgroups as means of communication. When the Internet was relatively obscure, Usenet Newsgroups were the forums for thousands of discussions, many of them technical. I used to regularly read newsgroups such as sci.electronics.equipment and sci.engr.electrical.compliance.

No more. Today, I belong to ten LinkedIn groups that I consider relevant to T&MW. They include Electronic/Optical Test & Measurement, Test Development, Metrolgy, and EMC. The July issue’s Test Voices interview came to me through a LinkedIn group.

Newsgroups lost their appeal because they were open communities. That was fine when the people using them remained true to the purpose of the group—to discuss specific topics. Then, the marketers started posting product announcements. That hurt, but not enough to kill Usenet. Once the spammers arrived, not only posting spasm but harvesting e-mail addresses, the game was over.

On LinkedIn, you first have to have an account to join a group. A group’s manager can limit who joins. (I was rejected from joining a group for former employees of T&MW’s parent company because I’m still employed here.) Even so, groups that were intended for technical discussions now find themselves needing subgroups. Why? Because marketers and recruiters have moved in. The Analog Mixed-Signal and RF (AMS/RF) IC Design and Development group now has a “no recruiters” subgroup. It’s reserved for technical discussions. I suspect that the subgroup’s name will need to be modified to “No recruiters and no marketers” to keep it pure.