I recently joined LinkedIn. It seems I’m always late to such parties; not because I haven’t heard of them, or because signing up takes much effort, or because I worry much about privacy. There has to be some other reason I have yet to figure out.

As with Facebook, the network is rather short on German members. When searching by name, I actually found the profile of an exec at my company, but aside from that, not a single German I know appears to be on LinkedIn. (Conversely, I’ve found dozens of profiles for Americans I know.)

It’s ironic, then, that the site proudly tells me “14 co-workers are using LinkedIn” when we don’t even have that employees currently. By searching their names, it becomes apparent why LinkedIn guesses they would be coworkers (the company name, suffix aside, is identical), but that’s no excuse. It doesn’t even say they might be coworkers, after all.

In short: LinkedIn needs unique idenfiers for companies. That there’s an employer of the same name (just ending with “Magazine”, not “AG”) in Ottawa and even one in the Cologne Area in Germany doesn’t mean they have anything to do with us, and it’s a shame LinkedIn doesn’t even say that there’s merely a likelihood the two companies are related.