We're currently building a tool, which uses Linkedin API, and I performed a fair amount of customer interviews about their use of professional network and, well, Linkedin.
A popular opinion of what I've heard is "Linkedin is dead", cause it's very old-school and not flexible to adapt to changes.
People use it for just adding contacts, sometimes randomly, and then they rarely do anything with them.
Recently they announced the restrictions to their API program, meaning that new cool tools, which try to make more sense of Linkedin data, will not be able to use Linkedin data anymore.
I guess, that will make it even more unpopular for users.
It's really for the benefit of the Employer -- not the employee, so it "sucks" for your side of the equation. If you had to find 25 C++ programmers for a government project that starts in June...it would be an amazing tool. (I'm not a recruiter)<p>It's pretty pointless for a job seeker, though I have received a handful of "leads" from recruiters -- so it might have some value.
What I found missing in LinkedIn is a way to show the chain of people that connect you with another person. Xing has this and it's really fun to play with it.<p>I left LinkedIn when they had their data breach in 2011 so I don't know if they have added this feature in the last couple of years. And apropos data breach - trust, maybe trust, that's for me the main thing that's missing.