First up, let me say that I don't think LinkedIn can kill Glassdoor.  Buy them?  Maybe, but that would have been easier before the street hit their stock hard a few weeks back.

But back to the title of the post - LinkedIn has a beta product that's asking for Salary data.  Here's what it looks like when members get tagged for inclusion in the beta:

What could go wrong?  Well, there's nothing wrong with LinkedIn making this play - it's an obvious extension into the employment game, as are other areas currently owned by Glassdoor more than anyone else - company reputation, reviews, etc.

The one little problem with this is privacy.  Glassdoor does a pretty good job of making anonymity their calling card.  While I can't say that LinkedIn has problems with that, it's not how they usually market and present member contributions.  For the most part, LinkedIn is all about the public side, as they should be - it's worked pretty damn well.  

But my sense is that a past focus on public identity will give LinkedIn members cause for pause on this type of salary reporting offer.

In addition, the LinkedIn community is smarter than ever about building the LinkedIn database on behalf of LinkedIn, only to have their rights restricted.  Issues with contacts, messaging and access to features that used to be free all but now aren't all combine to make me think twice on whether I would recommend sharing this type of data with the company.  

Here's what you get if you click on someone else's email offer to share your salary - thus, the knowledge that the product is in beta...

Final note.  Indeed owns SEO and aggregation.  LinkedIn owns the candidate database.  Glassdoor owns company reputation.  All of them want to race to the middle to do it all - with a focus on selling you job postings.  That's why Indeed now has company pages and candidate profiles, Glassdoor has job postings and LinkedIn is moving into candidate data and sentiment.  CareerBuilder has product to do most of these things as well.

Everybody Wants Some... at least that's what David Lee Roth used to say...