What's your Linkedin number?

As a rule you should not have design elements that can be curtailed by users. In other words, Linkedin opted not to have a "randomly browse users" feature yet that is exactly what you can do. It also reveals that Linkedin's architecture is based on userID which would be a good assumption anyway, but it reveals the userID of every user. If/when Linkedin falls prey to a SQL injection the attacker will know exactly what to go after.

The name of the game in security is to keep information away from attackers.

I recently visited an enterprise social network vendor. I pointed out to their "security guy" that every one of their customers could be discerned from the way their URLs were configured. His response was to argue how that was not a real issue. Wrong answer. Better to demonstrate that you are a paranoid security conscious company and obfuscate URLs than to try to convince customers that their concerns are not relevant.

I'm number 18,030,233. You bring up some really interesting points in this question. I never knew URL hacking could be so much fun :)

I could write a guide to URL hacking. :-) At Gartner they publish analyst profiles using their employee number in the URL. The bad part was that number was (is?) the login name for accessing the Gartner database!

I'm no Lori, but I was the 9,957th person to join LinkedIn. What's funny, is I didn't do much to participate initially because I was on ryze.com and wondered what the point was of joining another one...

Careful now, you might be dating yourself! Not sure I got into messaging until after 1999 with MSN and passed on ICQ. You got me beat on that one, so we are at a draw 1-1.

Rock, paper, scissors?

Lori joined when she was in the womb.

I just know good young companies when I see them.

Just curious. Apart from the possible scripting issue, why does this matter?

132,014 - tried on clean browser session and URL does nothing without proper authentication first.

My number is 486,522. I was not very active in LinkedIn during the first year. The email I received was certainly promotion for LinkedIn and was attempting to acknowledge early adopters.

24,335

You were an early bird, Richard.

Mine is: 1,854,299

I avoided it for years. I'm about 1.3M. Which is pretty bad since I knew some of the first folks to join. For the record, I was also the last person to join both Facebook and Twitter.

25,901.

Impressive Lori!

Oh yes JP. Linkedin has pretty good security. You have to be logged in *and* you have to be within 3 degrees of separation to even see a profile using the URL technique.

I guess Lori wins the status contest! We won't get into the value of social media ranking. Hard to monitize. :-)

I am also impressed by the awesomeness of Lori's number. :)

Behold Lori's AWESOMENESS!

Wow, I'm flattered! Too bad I can't turn that into something tangible.

I thought I was early, 67084. Lori, you're awesome! Did you join when you were in grade school???

While I'm in the 1st million for LinkedIn, I don't use Facebook so if I fired up an ID I'd be number 500 million something. So am I an early adopter or late adopter? :-)

Lori, I'm outright shocked - #481,055. BTW, this is the best PR LinkedIn has done in a while, eh.

Mine's 4,668.

I remember thinking that Plaxo was a much more useful service at the time, since they integrated business contact management directly in Outlook.

Way to steal Lori's thunder Steve. :-)

I quickly began to view Plaxo requests as annoying spam. Everytime someone scanned my business card Plaxo asked me to update my contact info. Linked is a much better model. Opt-in for connections, updates up to the user, the social stream of updates, groups, etc. A winner. :-)

Wow, this is embarrassing--93 million something:(

74914!

Hacking can be fun - as long as it is not crossing an illegal line or causing anyone damage, right? This is interesting information Richard - and although I could see number 10,000, when I tried to plug in 100 and 1000 I could not view the page as I am not "LinkedIn" to them so that spoiled some of my fun.

Speaking of fun (slightly competitive here), I beat you! Reid Hoffman, Co-founder and Chairman of LinkedIn sent this in an email to me, "I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn's first 100,000 members (member number 74914 in fact!). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the innovators, those who help lead the way. That was you." Even though I got in about 10,000 people before you, we can both think of ourselves as early adopters - and surely you must have received the same thank you letter from Reid yourself being in the first 100,000!

Although most of us on LinkedIn will have a more user friendly/vanity URL (mine is http://www.linkedin.com/in/paulhelm) that we promote and advertise, many times there is that other URL that can be found by the sleuths out there researching for list and lead generation (especially within the search industry). Kind of like peeling back the onion of URL's, right Richard? It can be fun to see what is out there and not readily or easily navigated.

Anyone know who 100 and 1000 are? These are the REAL early adopter/innovators!

You got me beat Paul. Probably by about a week considering how fast Linkedin was growing then.

OK, what's your ICQ number? I jumped on that early, around 200,000.

Truthfully, I trashed the e-mail. I found it meaningless. Does it really make a difference if your no 1,000 or 1 million. It's whether the system works and if that's the case whether your making the system work for you.

LinkedIn works (although like everything else it could be better) and it's working for me. So yeah for me and hopefully for you as well.

Wayne

It's fun. OK, It's fun. My number is 69074. I found it amazing because I'm beginning to see the time-line for something to hit critical mass. Kinda like Starbucks being 40 years old. Go figure.

My number is 1,698,199
I feel like I arrived late for the party.
SIGH!

4,320,037 -- kinda middle-of-the-pack.

I have no idea and don't find it relevant. I learned in the last two years that numbers, unless related to a bottomline, often mean very little. Social media and social media marketers often give false importance to numbers. There are far more relevant details, data, and measurements.

24085 ... cool thread. Lori probably invited me !

So what prize do I get for being 1,275,389? Seems like a nice enough number. I guess I am better than one in a million!

I am 114,170 Jan '04. What they should do is give one share to each of the first 1 million members - these are the "founders" of the network as well. Also probably full membership for life time would be noce recognition too.

I am in the 5 million range. I like the ring of that because it says established, but not a start up.

Have a great day everyone!

403,056. Says a lot about me. Not a bleeding edge early adopter, but close.

I'm a little more embarrassed about my twitter account number: 13,953,312. I knew about twitter for a long time after it first started. I always said "so what", but now I use it more than Facebook... which on another topic, I am not using much anymore.

901,798 Under The Millionth!!