Anyone who's been following the recent bust-up between Linkedin's Management and it's "Power Networkers" will perhaps be wondering why the Friday 13th date has been and gone without any noticeable change (to me anyway)

For some background, check out For a New Etiquette of LinkedIn and, in particular, the comments by Konstantin Guericke, Linkedin's co-founder.

In essence, Linkedin's management are upset that some members are using the tools they provided (ability to upload thousands of email addresses and send mass invitations to connect) to SPAM thousands of people who are not interested in connecting on Linkedin. This obviously gives Linkedin a bad name and discourages people who would otherwise join and only invite the people they know and trust (as the founders of Linkedin intended).

Much of the revolt is happening because Linkedin have announced measures to curb this abuse by putting a limit on how many people you can invite. The figure of 3000 has been mentioned. At present it seems unclear if that's a total lifetime cap, or simply a cap of how many can be sent out at any one time.

For many of the "Power Networkers", who have upward of 3,000 connections on Linkedin, they will have certainly exceeded this limit already and therefore face the possibility that they can no longer invite anyone to connect with them. To a "Power Networker" this is basically stopping them from functioning.

I understand exactly where Linkedin are coming from in terms of stopping SPAM (and agree with them). However, I would say that they did create the tools to use the site for this purpose, whereas other networking platforms, such as Ecademy and openBC, actually have some inbuilt daily limits that stop this approach.

Anyway, this was all supposed to happen on Friday 13th (I think Konstantin has a great sense of humour) along with a few other changes but, as I say, I haven't noticed any major change on the platform.

But then, Konstantin did say that the people who were actually abusing the system (and had received complaints against them) were a small number and that "they know who they are" as they will have already received a warning by Linkedin's Privacy Policy Department.

Labels: social networking sites