Jobs and Titles

For several years I've been on LinkedIn, which for me was the first social network. It being the first such a network (for me) was the main reason to try it out. I haven't really used it for much, except that recently its critical mass has grown to the point where it is a nice way to get in touch with old university friends. So every now and then I get a request from somebody to join and that's how I visited my LinkedIn page last week. This time I noticed that it has a feature that informs about people having viewed one's profile. Naturally I am curious about the people that are curious about me, so I tried to follow a couple of the links that were provided. But viewers don't really leave traces of their identity, but typically their title and company, e.g. "Specialist at Nokia". Of course with some luck there is only one holder of that title in the company, but Nokia has 500 "Specialists" (that are known to LinkedIn). Which is not so strange for a technology company with over 50 000 employees. My profile was also viewed by "Director at France Telecom", and it turned out that FT has a staggering 177 directors (again as known to LinkedIn).