Wasn’t downloading contacts from gmail standard for bootstrapping social networks? I know Facebook did that and I’m fairly certain Snapchat and Twitter did too. This doesn’t excuse it, but I generally recall this as being sort of a standard onboarding process in ‘07 or so.
Yup. They used to (or maybe still do) have 5 pages of "Do you know these people? What about these?" each time I logged in, and in one of the pages it would ask to connect to your contacts. I don't know how but they actually tricked me into do it that, and all my gmail "contacts" (read: anyone i ever sent an e-mail to) received an invite to connect to me. I received hundreds on new connections over the following days.
I closed LinkedIn last year when I realized I never got anything remotely good out of it. It's a terrible place to find jobs. There is no lack of websites that do the same, but better.
