My LinkedIn Avatar

Comments (Archived):

1. Its fascinating that their CS team thought removing high-profile avatars as inappropriate would end well.

   1. It’s the member that’s high profile, not the avatar.I agree with Fred that he considers the Avatar part of his personal brand, but I don’t think it’s up to his networks to judge whats appropriate other than a “photo” and I think it will get a bit too subjective in terms why one may be allowed and not the other. The profile gives you the opportunity to upload a “photo,” not an image or logo. Nothing wrong with their wanting consistency.

      1. yeah, but i don’t have to keep a profile there and may choose not to if i can’t do it the way i want

         1. True Fred, but I imagine most LinkedIn users don’t have as big a social media footprint to fall back on as you do, so they’ll be more inclined to draw within the lines.

            1. why should LinkedIn be in the business of forcing their users to draw within the lines? How does that add value?

            2. Agree.LInkedIn while useful is struggling towards understanding social. Not only late to the game with Twitter but their groups and blog commenting systems are antiquated with no Disqus like identity systems.

            3. For business use imo linkedin’s execution is nearly flawless – with regard, specifically, to identity i have never seen what even looks like a fake profile (i have close to 1000 connections) so maybe they don’t feel there’s a need to verify since it’s not a problem?As far as taking down Fred’s avatar, can’t see any reason for that …

            4. Good point. And from a company point of reference, my network (500+) does continually connect me with old friends and find new clients. I’m not knocking their basic value as I use them.It does seems like LinkedIn feels the need (and they should) for a more active community (Twitter, blogs) to generate activity and growth around their valuable vault of info. My point is simply that the avatar conundrum and a clunky infrastructure to manage cross group activities shows some strategic shortsightedness and hesitancy in how to proceed. They have a significant base and using even some basic comment and community cross group structures, they could find their own dynamic. My ideas on using comment systems to build community would apply to them as well I think http://bit.ly/1bfHWf.

            5. Every website has lines they ‘force their users to drawn within’, it’s just a question of where those lines are, and how strictly they’re enforced. I just checked the LinkedIn user agreement and in the “DON’T” section, it does clearly say:”[DON’T] upload a cartoon, symbol, drawing or any content other than a photograph of yourself in your profile photo;”I disagree with the policy; on LinkedIn more than more places, this image should be your personal brand, whatever that may be. I know they struggled with the decision to add a photo at all for a long time (and a lot of users strongly opposed having them), so I’m guessing that’s where this policy came from, but they need to rethink the rationale behind this particular point.

            6. Because we can’t all be special snowflakes. Successful entrepreneurs, artists, venture capitalists, etc. can afford to be eccentric, but people looking for jobs need to conform to certain conventions, and I suspect there are more job seekers and employers on LinkedIn than there are eccentrics.

            7. i’d hire someone with an avatar before someone without one every day of theweek

            8. good to know

            9. Seems like Hollywood directors agree with you this month…

            10. Fred,I suspect you aren’t representative of the typical LinkedIn user, and that LinkedIn’s policies are geared toward that typical user. I could be wrong, and if I am, your complaints about LinkedIn’s avatar policy will be echoed by many more of its users.

            11. I don’t think websites should be so determinent of how they will be used. Let’s the users decide

            12. i think linkedin has been hanging out with crapple, trying the tyranny strategy. doubt it will work.

            13. I wonder if it’s fears of a legal sh$t storm that has prevented a competitor from using a version of Apple’s 1984 ad against it, e.g., in the context of the mobile Internet devices.

            14. But if this were really an ironclad social convention, there would be no need to explicitly make it a policy. Those conventions evolve; our arguments in this very thread are part of that evolutionary process; and I agree with @awaldstein that this shows LinkedIn “struggling to understand social”.It’s a CS mindset applying a rule that’s strictly correct, but not considering its marketing/community implications.

            15. social norms are needed, but the internet is here to disrupt and re-create our social norms, as currently they are not serving us. the internet will accomplish this revolution of social norms by delivering the truth that sets us free.9/11 was an inside job,kid mercury

            16. Oh Daveinhckensack – we are ALL special snowflakes. Avatars aren’t eccentric and personal brands are in the eye of the beholder. I guess if you are looking for an accounting job, creativity isn’t required but for the rest of society where it’s at the heart of differentiation and commerce I think you may just be, well, completely off base.(oh and can someone talk to someone about being able to unlike if you’ve accidentally liked a post? It was a husky dog accident 😉

            17. I’m not with you on this one Dave. They pushed in Twitter, you can link to your Facebook or your blog. They want to drive themselves as a center or connected to the people’s networks. Just because they haven’t figured it out yet is no reason to state that they shouldn’t.

         2. Fred,I find the removal of your avatar incredibly odd. As you’re aware, I’m very pro-copyright. I think LinkedIn’s decision about your avatar to be an area of concern. It is a artistic representation of your visage, created from an actual photograph. As you noted previously, you commissioned the artwork for your avatar, noted provenance for the graphic and the painting hanging in your office, and have purchased or licensed both outright.This is very, very odd. I’m gonna keep an eye on this one.

2. Have to agree with LinkedIn on this.

   1. Seconded. Have to agree with Bruce Colwin on this.

3. Kinda nuts. While LinkedIn struggles to find its social pulse, they are obviously flapping around without much of a roadmap.Allowing single identities (branded avatars) with the other communities is one sure way to aid this to happen.

4. LinkedIn is not exactly what I’d call an innovative or even particularly creative company. Ok, sure, they’ve achieved their desired network effects and become the place where people put their professional identity on the web. But it seems that unlike Facebook who is still innovating and doing cool or at least risky new shit with their product and pushing the envelope, LinkedIn has quickly gone into value-extraction mode. Every feature they add is waaay-late to the game. I mean, they just now added Twitter integration. What are they, a newspaper company? I’m distinctly unimpressed. It won’t happen fast, but I can’t imagine that they’ll keep their market leadership for long

5. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Would be interested in hearing LinkedIn’s rationale for this decision. Also surprised that this is the type of thing they are spending time (unless of course it has become an acknowledged pervasive problem for abuse).

6. This is the inherent tension in this kind of an environment. An organization like LinkedIn should be responsible for policing its network (to keep out bots, spammers, and malware), but any other level of policing should be left to the community. I use a real picture on my LinkedIn profile, not this cartoon image, but it shouldn’t matter. The LinkedIn community should decide my level of professionalism, and whether or not they would want to either meet or do business with me. Unnecessary policing like this does nothing but engender ill will, especially now that Fred and Charlie have publicized this.I’m really struggling to see how a move like this helps LinkedIn.

7. I use our logo for my avatar since in most cases I’m commenting re business issues. LI, a business network, doesn’t allow that and my logo was stripped. It’s kinda of odd and anti business.

8. I think that they have a point. If you consider Linkedin as a professional CV depository, and a place where you go to connect to people related to your line of work, then you’d need to treat your Linkedin profile as a CV. I wouldn’t use an avatar for my CV, so for me it does make sens to request all users to have photos of themselves.

   1. it makes sense for you but not for memy avatar is my brandAVC.com is my resume and look what is at the top of it

      1. Do you believe that sometime in the future each person will have a central location in which he stores all his personal data, social graph, contact points etc. and websites like Linkedin would ask for a permission to use that central location’s API with your data in order to show it differently? (pro CV-like website, games fun and applications, minimalistic status-only etc.)I believe that it will happen soon or late, and when it happens – Linkedin will choose to pull your photo from that central DB, and not your avatar. You will be able to choose if it’s something you like – and join Linkedin, or not. It looks like Linkedin says “we want real people, with real verifiable identities – not brands”. And that’s a legitimate strategy IMO.

         1. i suppose all of that is coming

         2. “we want real people, with real verifiable identities – not brands”This is a fine sentiment–but with all the other identifying info on your LinkedIn page, having a cartoon avatar isn’t a serious obstacle to identification.

9. Can you wear a T-Shirt with your avatar on it?Satisfy the letter of the law, but do it your way.Or let the account rot/delete it. I just recently connected with some friends on LinkedIn and so far I’m not sure what it’s good for, besides another channel to communicate. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad by any means but as of now I have yet to discover the “AHA!” moment of LinkedIn. In contrast, I found that AHA! moment of the crazy interface/functionality of Google Wave in a week.

   1. I’m still looking there…

   2. what was your Google Wave “AHA” moment? i’ve been hanging back on the new-tech-adoption curve on this one intentionally.

10. From the list of Don’ts from the LinkedIn user agreement: “upload a cartoon, symbol, drawing or any content other than a photograph of yourself in your profile photo;”Seems like you violated that… Sure there is argument on whether or not this is a valid User Agreement, but you did agree to it by registering at their site.

    1. yup. not knowingly though. i can still bitch about their rules.

11. Weird, LinkedIn lets me use this avatar. ..or maybe they haven’t noticed yet…*goes back to flying under the radar*

    1. i think charlie o’donnell outed me

12. well I’m in trouble then…

13. I can’t believe that LinkedIn are exerting their time and energy on this. You would think they would have better things to be working on. That said, I welcome the fact that they are paying more attention to profile pictures. Since they launched that feature, profile pics have been a second-rate feature on LinkedIn as shown by their default privacy settings which hide them to people outside your network. If there’s one good thing in all of this, it’s that they are finally admitting that faces are important.

14. I like the idea of having a personal brand style logo. However, since you meet a lot of new people you may want to consider having a good portrait of yourself in a reasonable location, such as your website “about” page (right now your about page only has a photo of you and your family, taken from a distance). That way people can associate your brand logo, which is fairly abstract, with what you actually look like.

15. linkedin really did this? is it possible that there is some misunderstanding here? it strikes me as an incredibly poor decision. but this is the problem with the big communities like linkedin. ultimately i think folks will gravitate towards teh communities with the governance policies that most reflect their values. and their values will be determined by their influencers. all of this leads to the inevitable conclusion: blog stars, and blog-based communities. no need for linkedin boss. we can do it all here on avc, and can probably leverage open source stuff to create a good enough substitute for the technology component, thus flexing the disruptive power of open source software. although i do think the open source disruption benefits from non-net neutrality, just as the web apps disruption that you guys play through USV benefits from net neutrality.

    1. You know, I think you’re pointing at a new trend. As web community development software continues to become more powerful and more accessible, we’re definitely going to see very interesting technology created for specific, concrete communities rather than as platforms for the general public.But why do you think open source benefits from net non-neutrality?

       1. regarding (open source) OS and net neutrality (NN), i view NN has largely being about imposing regulations on internet serivce providers (ISPs). this prevents ISPs from encroaching on the market share of web apps, which fred and many of his VC peers invest in. thus they have an incentive to support NN. i do agree with them that in our current environment it would be worthwhile to protect their market share, however i do not think NN is necessarily the best way to do that. i also think the big challenge may be there is no good way to protect their market share (though i agree it should be protected to some extent, in some way).what i view as good news in this situtation is that OS commoditizes web apps. it lets anyone build a web app. so if linkedin sucks, who cares, we can just use low cost, open source software that we can tweak as needed to accomplish the social networking objectives linkedin was serving, and we can do so on our own terms. and if ISPs decide to buy up everything and block certain apps from connecting, because it is so easy to create an app (since it is OS technology), it is easier to create apps that will conform to ISP standards, and more importantly, customers can move to an ISP that will allow it. in this situation, it is important for free market principles that the barriers to entry to the ISP market be low, so that the ISP market can be competitive, which will force them to be open and to accomdoate apps. if they don’t, customers will simply choose an ISP that does.NN makes regulatory costs greater. this increases barriers to setting up an ISP. thus i view as potentially detrimental to the value trajectory that would emerge through the use of open source software as a good enough alternative to proprietary web apps like linkedin. of course, this is the value trajectory that i am banking on, so i am biased. 🙂 however, in the broader sense of things, i do not favor market regulation when government is corrupt. i believe quite strongly that if you wish to use government as a useful tool to help maintain order in society and markets, you must first have a functioning and responsible government. trying to get the perks of government without doing the work of creating good government is a strategy that i think is doomed to failure for everyone.

          1. There are multiple levels of ISPs, most of the small ones that I grew up with are gone. ISPCON stopped meeting… it’s about those who own upstream, because we are more directly connected now…It’s a really interesting question of effeciency, and market power.

          2. What if the isp charges the app developer to run on their network. How does open source help you in that situation?

             1. IMHO the ideal condition is a highly competitive ISP market, in which case ISPs engaging in excessively protectionist policies (or policies that are protectionist in a way that is negative overall for the economic value of the community, whether this is by blocking quality, legit apps, or by charging a network entry fee that is too high), are easily outperformed. so if ISP #20 is becoming too tyrannical and blocking innocent web apps (or charging an entrance fee that is too high, as determined by marketplace) in a way that is limiting value creation opportunities overall, ISP #21 can offer a better deal, and can present this as an advntage to consumer (“we have a safe, fast, web that lets you run all your favorite apps, unlike ISP #20!”)open source also lets you compete in a more combative way with ISPs. for instance lets’s say ISP #20 wants to block a centralized web app. right now this is pretty easy for ISP #20 to do. if the app is open source and more distributed, though, it is harder to block. moreover, if they do block in some way, the open source community can very quickly release a patch that could conceivably allow the app to bypass the ISP’s restrictions. on a less combative note, it allows for open source communities to quickly release a patch that meets the ISP’s legitimacy requirements, should the open source community find this to be an agreeable solution, or should some members of the OS community want to pursue this option. in the world of centralized web apps, all such decisions are left to the owners of the centralized web app. i think in many ways this relates to dave winer’s beef with highly centralized systems like twitter, it is simply too much centralized control. that is why i think google has won the web apps disruption, and the next disruption, the next thing that becomes the economic force that drives the web, is rooted in open source, and more broadly, quality peer production communities. web 2012!

             2. Yup. I agree what the ideal scenario is

16. I think this relates back to the question of what are your digital clothing (I happen to always dislike mine, but that’s ok, I’m exploring my digital identity and what it means). If linkedin wants to effectively control output of identity and its visual politic, by controlling the output of what it means to be portrayed, that are going to run into massive problems, as we are witnessing right here, because effectively they run into the psyche of what it means to be viewed as human on the internet. Portraiture is one of the few common medium which people feel they control. it is effectively an extension of the psche’s view of oneself. It is why is is so hard to do a sketch of the general human without putting elements of how you see yourself in it.I take your avatar to mean something about how you relate to yourself. Charlie O’Donnell (CEONYC) starts to get at this point, about being more than the resume. It’s a totality of of digital linkage about him, including his choice of avatar. That picture has implicit meaning about his identity as a result, because of the total amount of facetime it has compared to his actual face. In visual language terms, the viewer implies all sorts of meanings to that image, and because Charlie chose it, he therefore owns those meanings as well (Choose your image wisely!) Even if they are not meanings that Charlie wants, he therefore has to own them, since they are attached to the image he chose. He attracted the eyes he chose with his image, and made them light up with certain ideas about him. To take away from this conception of what a picture means to portray when we display one on a social network is a very dangerous concept indeed. Pure faces do not do, for we project meaning on to them in ways that a photo of an actual face is much harder to do, which is why portraiture in painting, drawing and sculpture remains so powerful as a medium to this day. (New media, video and photography are a whole other world which I am declining to comment on, that’s a whole other thought process. They can do so, but it is a much more complicated process in its creation) As a result, as Charlie makes very clear, a portrait in fact could be more revealing than an actual photograph, particularly the formal kind, since a properly chosen one will reveal the internal psyche of the wo/man that you are interacting with. So you want your identity to be the painting. I personally would say that as an icon, it holds importance beyond branding, because it holds the viewer in thrall of your image and creates meaning beyond your control. I’m for you using it, and against linkedin’s policy.I don’t think they quite understand what it means to take the measure of the man vis a vis his painting or drawing…because it should be as revealing than a pure photo any day.**one note is that it might also reveal about the artist. Just a thought to keep in the back of your head.

17. “… That’s unfortunate. I’m with Charlie on this one. I think we should be able to determine what we want to use to represent ourselves professionally within reason …”And if you do at least be able to pay for it. I thought that would have been an obvious choice. LinkedIn smacks of insiders, closed doors and exclusion. This might be all right for those who work for/with “the man” but not those who don’t. Does LinkedIn have some competition? Would there be any benefit of a more *open* alternative (aside from twitter)?ps: Fred what is the origin of your avatar?

    1. ah, i have a good answer for thathttp://www.avc.com/a_vc/200…

18. What a shame. When I read the news of LinkedIn’s move, I immediately thought of your brand because of your article of explanation this week. I have a feeling they’ll reconsider- I don’t think this move was fully thought out and I doubt they believed this amount of noise would be made.

19. I’ve been debating about deleting my LinkedIn account… This is just another nail in their coffin IMO.

20. Somehow I doubt I’ll ever be able to use my “online brand” in LinkedIn.

    1. Ha

21. my sister painted my avatar. im connected to her on linkedin. isnt that the ultimate recommendation?

22. I find this rather surprising. You would think, being around as long as LinkedIn has been, they would have avoided such a rookie mistake.I’m wondering what motivated this. Someone didn’t just wake up and say; “hey we need to remove all the non-real photos from our users profiles. Something had to trigger this.If that is what happened, it’s troubling and you’d have to ask other boneheaded move awaits?

    1. I wouldn’t be surprised if some manager at LinkedIn actually did wake up one day and decide that from now on they will have only real pictures as avatars and that’s how they will be different from all those other social networks. Then, the next day they had a three hour meeting where everyone was checking email and reading twitter feeds and they agreed that they should remove non-photo avatars.

       1. There seems to be a “silly” line all companies cross when they get to a certain size. It appears LinkedIn has crossed it.

    2. i’m glad you called it a rookie mistake. that’s exactly what it is.

23. What are they going to do next? Start editing you profile because they don’t like what it says? Ridiculous!

24. “I don’t think websites should be so determinent of how they will be used. Let’s the users decide.”This comment struck me as rather provocative… going to have to think about that.As far as the avatar uprising goes, I will be disappointed if LinkedIn caves in and lets you put it back up.First, they have as much of a right to opt for a “consistent presentation across all of the professionals” in their community as USV.com has of opting for one on the company site. They also have a compelling reason to want that space to be used for a personal photo rather than branding – since it has to do with making human connections, and people could use avatars as a way to disguise something, e.g., someone trying to counter age or race bias.You are way outside of the professional community on the avatar branding thing (in my experience). I would never interview a candidate whose LinkedIn page is a cartoon. On a blog or MySpace it’s fine, but LinkedIn is jacket-required. Letting users use avatars or even encouraging them would change the experience – and it’s up to LinkedIn to decide the look and feel. I’m not sure I’m agreeing with your “let the user decide” approach….Facebook does the same thing to some extent. You have to use your own name, though not your photo. If your avatar’s name was Cartoon Fred, you still couldn’t legally call yourself that on Facebook. MySpace went the Facebook route as far as moving toward real names, so I think there’s something there. And I just can’t see that your branding argument should apply to pictures and not to names.

    1. i talked to their CEO yesterday about this and i can assure you they are notgoing to cave just for mebut they are interested in my opinion and rethinking their policy which is astep in the right direction”jackets only” places exist but i avoid them at all costso stuffy and full of themselves

       1. Of course, they won’t “cave just for” you. They’ll “put it to the community” in a poll – which would really follow the Facebook approach with the privacy policy, etc., and probably set a precedent they would cringe over. Or someone will rap his knuckles on your virtual door and give you two winks and a whistle and a link to the settings page, and let you know the guy that takes down avatars has been reassigned to the Green Zone.I think you’re being unfair to them. Part of their appeal is a no-nonsense professionalism that a sizable portion of corporate America is still nostalgic about. The corporate types that are not yet on LinkedIn, i.e., where much of their growth is going to come from, are going to register kicking and screaming. If the person that invites them is represented by a green broomstick robot, their only first impression won’t be what LinkedIn wants it to be.You could let this one go – or at least leave yourself more room to save face. They’ve built a good and practical brand and image. I admit I only use it when I’m looking for resources, but I’ve been impressed with that capability and have hired great people that way. It’s one thing if the community is up in arms over a policy change… it’s another if a prominent kingmaker is pitching a fit over the enforcement of a long-standing one. Though it’s great that they’re listening to you; did you reach out to them, or them to you?I managed a nice smirk when I first saw that little [brilliant] whelp Zuckerberg wearing a tie. I’ll be checking your LinkedIn profile… 😉

          1. I reached out to them firstI’m not looking to make a stinkThey have the right to do whatever they want and I’ve said my piece on thisYou won’t hear a peep from me on this unless they ask me to say something

25. that’s frankly a stupid thing to do. let’s see if they take green people avatars?

26. I have been on Linkedin for sometime and I don’t know what benefit I have derived from it other than fodder for my ongoing critiques of their meandering product strategies. Removing your avatar is just one more thing that bugs me about this site. The more I hear about them the more I think they are a solution looking for a problem that just doesn’t exist. Thanks to the Twitter integration (sorry Twitter team had to waste valuable resource on that) I don’t have to ever have to visit Linkedin to make it look like I care. BTW, I think that avatar (illustration) “says” more about you than any photo would.

    1. That last bit is the whole point. A picture tells a thousand words

       1. Yes, that’s exactly what I got from your blog.

27. Seems to me this gets into a privacy issue as well. Which is worse? Nothing or a cartoon representation? Seems that the next step would be to require a photo, one that accurately depicted who you are.Put me down as for avatars.

    1. Says the man with a photo!BTW, I was forced to become a verified Disqus user to leave a comment elsewhere earlier today, and when I left my comment there I found that that site’s default image was of a 1940s pin-up or something, so I uploaded the logo of my not-yet-launched second site as a temporary avatar.

28. I prefer it most of the time. I do find a bit disturbing that when you iconize the page, or switch tabs, you get the Eye of Fred staring at you very directly.I still think we’re only at the beginning of the idea of personality and avatarism on the web. I don’t think this answers the question of jumping the shark. I think we need to ask more questions about social networks and how they function. They may function to reed’s law in part, but I think there is more to that. Most people don’t live in a reed’s law space. So when they enter a space that is under the conditions of reed’s law, what happens to them and their body (or representation)? No one is quite sure what that even means yet….Even I’m not, and I’m trying to find a localition to discover that, but the deeper I look, the harder it is to find. This issue with the picture pull makes this conception of the person even more pressing. Is your linkedin page really a representation of who you are? Where should you be represented, and isn’t that an odd question- we never ask that in the real, non-digital world…you just sort of sit/stand/walk around. You don’t need a representation, and hence don’t need a location or a type for it. And how does it interact? And does it interact separately from you or in an integrated way? This linkedin pull makes an argument that your avatar can in fact act separately from you in an odd way… Linkedin is a space, and your avatar lives in it. If linkedin likes your avatar of course…*sigh* Such is what I think about to get a bachelors….

29. i’m not on linkedin, but i support this movement. digital activism is where it’s at IMHO.

30. Most of my friends who are new users though are like me, they are finding the layout and the amount of botting, ect, hard to get their heads around. They can’t figure out the basics, like who is online… That’s a basic problem, that you need instructioons to figure out such basic tools inside the larger sharing.Also they idea of 200+ public waves, scares them…they are hard to get your head to mentally get around.

31. I’ve yet to get my head wrapped around wave. Maybe I will soon

32. Still getting there, which I think for what they wanted to do is a design disaster. This might have been one of those things where they should have looked at linkedin,facebook, and then try canvasing out how you would do collaborations in those environments…I’ve thought about this problem in the past. This is something I would do a mockup for, but I think another issue they have is security…I need to work with people to do this right. There is no real way I can even start drawing this one down the way I want without good drilling about what’s what.Just the amount of loopholes and problems…God…front end’s nightmare.