Lately I have witnessed a new trend: LinkedIn endorsements. I have been endorsed and I have endorsed myself several people.
The problem with endorsements is that they are flawed by design. It is possible that an surgeon to endorse a software engineer for knowledge on Dante's works. I have seen HR people endorsing project managers for Java skills and because I know them both I can state that the endorsement is not relevant. I have also seen technical endorsements between people who had not even shared the same hallway for technical talks, not to mention the fact that they never worked on the same team/group/project or even seen each-other's code or design.
I have no silver bullet idea how would it be possible to make endorsements reliable. One way would be to bet on people's honesty, but...everybody lies.
Another way would be to limit the endorsements to the intersection of the skills the two individuals have hence making it harder to endorse someone blindly as the intersection of the skill sets would limit the interaction to peers.
A finer grained approach would be to have the skill sets associated to a position and the endorsements to be enabled only for the skills the endorser end the endorsee have in common if both worked in the same company or the were in a common project or in a business relation for the period.
In the meanwhile I am curious how LinkedIn will solve this.
Maybe LI doesn't want to "solve" it. They just wanted something new in order to generate activity on the site - otherwise, they could be considered as yet another dead social network.
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