Like the good digital troll following the leader savvy professional digital marketer I am, I generally read every article on TechMeme and TechCrunch, trying out nearly every service they cover in depth. So tonight I tried CubeDuel.
CubeDuel is Hot or Not built on LinkedIn. CubeDuel pits your professional colleagues - past and present - against each other and invites you to vote on the better one of them. The more people you vote for, the more access to you get to your own standing in CubeDuel.
I gave CubeDuel a solid try and I wanted to like it given some of the reviews. But I found myself skipping nearly every match as I either didn't have real experience working with this person, or I preferred to work with one over the other for reasons that had nothing to do with the context of the question. After stumbling through 20 ratings, I quit and I'm not going back.
But I'm not putting down CubeDuel just because I didn't enjoy it. My real problem with CubeDuel is that it's build on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is not MySpace or even Facebook. LinkedIn isn't a place where we are kidding around. This is our professional network, online. I respect my colleagues and sure, I have opinions about which I would like to work with - we all do. But pitting them head to head and asking for a winner isn't accurate, it's not productive and all it can do is hurt people. Nothing good comes out of this, and this is people's careers and livelihoods we're talking about. I seriously hope no recruiter, manager or potential employer considers a tool like CubeDuel in considering a prospect or employee. This is not GlassDoor or even RateMyProfessor. CubeDuel is beyond infantile, it's bad news for everyone involved. Even if you have a gripe with a few people and your darker side wants to leave a negative ranking, you're going to need to make the same choices against colleagues you honestly respect. And in a social world, we all live in glass houses (so don't throw stones). This entire platform just screams of bad news.
Here's to hoping that we get over CubeDuel, and quickly. Here's to hoping that no one in my network is shortsighted enough to spend more than 5 minutes on this platform, or rates more than their first 20 or even 100 matches.
In today's work environment, the strongest mark of your professionalism isn't your ranking on CubeDuel, it's the fact that you aren't even registered on it.
