Those within LinkedIn’s “ivory tower” must realize the potentiality of the SuperConnectors banding together to create/finance their own social networking platform. Thus, if this is the case, those within the SuperConnectors network, and subsequent active network base, will follow them. Where does that leave LinkedIn? It leaves them in a precarious situation which could be remedied allowing the purity of networking to proceed naturally without encumberance. Furthermore, I could envision those same SuperConnectors who are also well-connected to LinkedIn’s venture capital firms to provide “decisive” feedback to LinkedIn’s current management with “potential” proposed changes for the long term.

However, it is a “potentiality”; yet, the situation must be realized and stressed to make the appropriate changes.

Michael

All communities and organizations need to act in a way that preserves them. If LinkedIn cannot control people who destroy the open nature of networking, then its value will degrade and everyone will have lost something except for a few selfish people.

After all is said and done, there is a lot of value to connecting to people that you don’t really know. After all, we could just email or im all our friends and acquaintances on a regular basis. The value of linked in is to augment conversations that might not ordinarily occur, but there is also a lot of value to people to connect for commercial reasons as well.

I believe that the mechanisms to protect the community are already largely in place, and they include setting preferences for the type of contact you’d prefer. Perhaps, there could also be a setting for notifications. On the down side this requires action on the part of passive users. The flip side of this is that this is a community and a marketplace, and one cannot assume that everyone will abide by the “rules”

Thank you so much for this detailed answer, this is exactly the kind of dialogue I was trying to foster with my initial post. I wholeheartedly agree with you and believe that the approach you are taking regarding the issue of spam invitations is a sound one.

A complementary solution could be to enable the invitation process from other interfaces than just the linkedin.com website or the Outlook email client, such as Salesforce.com for example. This would allow power networkers to tailor the content of their invitation to the recipient’s profile, thereby adding value to the invitation itself.

We did this specifically to promote active networking, and to eliminate the ill effects of spam that can happen when a few hundred people go over the edge and sends tens of thousands of invitations. When few people accept their invitations, it is clear that their invitations are unwelcome by our users.

And this small group of a few hundred people does a disservice to the hundreds of thousands of active networkers on LinkedIn who are sensitive to the fact that not everyone is an active networker and that people you don’t know have to be approach in a targeted and thoughtful manner, so that there is value for the recipient.

The invitation messages sent by the group of people who send out mass-invitations to people who don’t know them (let’s call them link collectors for now), may not be advertising a product, like traditional spam, but we all have email boxes that are overflowing, and the last thing the typical LinkedIn users wants is to get an invitation from someone you don’t know.

This is not to say that there aren’t people who appreciate the invitation and who appreciate the fact that the link collector is willing to introduce them to people he or she knows (although you have to wonder what value they can really add when they introduce people they don’t know). But most of our users vote with their feet by not accepting their invitations.

In fact, starting in mid-2005, we received an increasing number of complaints about the link collectors, and users asked us why we let them invite so many people in the first place. We realized we should be more pro-active, and when we looked at the data, we found that people who sent out more than 3,000 invitations were much more likely to draw complaints, and so we made that the default invitation limit.

This limit is a flexible one. As long as their invitation and complaint rates are within the normal range, users will be able to send more invitations. However, if the feedback of our users indicates that their invitations have been generally unwelcome relative to other invitations they receive, we will not increase that limit. We believe that such a “wisdom of the crowds” is best since community standards and feedback regulate what’s OK and what isn’t.

Having invitations limits puts less of a burden on our user base to report people who send them unwelcome invitations, and I think it will make people select more carefully whom they invite to connect. This applies to both free and paying members. Privacy is non-negotiable.

Now, if we didn’t build LinkedIn for active networkers, who did we build it for? We built LinkedIn for the typical business user who knows that relationships matter in business and would like to re-connect with former co-workers, classmates, clients and business partners, and who believe there is value in managing and leveraging their existing network of contacts more effectively, both for their business and career success.

Most LinkedIn users adopt similar principles, which is one of the reasons why LinkedIn is working so well. Nevertheless, there is a group of very active networkers who believe that connecting to a broader audience and being selective only when forwarding requests increases the chances of forwarding a useful request, on both sender and receiver sides.

I belong to the later group and found the approach to be fairly effective. It also creates more connexity in the network, in the sense that it connects groups of people that belong to different geographies or industry verticals and would have little chances of meeting otherwise. In my opinion, this connexity is precisely what makes LinkedIn magic.

All that being said, I believe that both approaches work and it’s up to the individual user to decide what’s best for her.

LinkedIn Corp. encourages us to only invite people into our network that we know well. I’ve generally agreed with this principle and typically decline invitations from those people that just send a generic invitation. I try to cultivate a dialogue with those people who are of interest to me and then with some familiarity will connect with them.

Are the LinkedIn principles for ‘qualified connections’ serving some unknown agenda? What are the views of a power networker and reasons for their building such huge #’s in their network. I have around 260 connections, and I probably know 65% of them quite well. So while I’m not a small passive user, I’m unclear about the gain in expanding to thousands of people.

What am I missing about social networking that you power networkers can share to shed light on my ignorance?

Thank you.