Comments on: LinkedIn No Longer Allowing Invite Messages?

By: Social Networking: Theory and Practice | The Noisy Channel

Social Networking: Theory and Practice | The Noisy Channel — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 20:16:21 +0000

[...] sent out a targeted message (in fact, a invite with personalized message–a feature I recently feared they’d killed). The results were overwhelmingly positive. I’m not sure how many of the people I contacted [...]

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:25:39 +0000

Looks like the problem is resolved. Glad it was just a bug / moment of temporary insanity!

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:17:30 +0000

According to the customer service message (see the update), it is a glitch. I hope so. In the meantime, I’m certainly more cautious about inviting people. I customize messages on most of my invitation requests–it’s an old-school sort of CAPTCHA where I prove I’m not a spammer by showing I care enough to write a personal message.

By: Stavros Macrakis

Stavros Macrakis — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:12:59 +0000

Agreed that this is an annoying change. I should be able to give context to my LinkedIn invites, e.g. “Nice to see you on LinkedIn — you may recall we worked together on the ABC123 project in 1995.” or “I enjoyed the discussion we had at SIGIR.” or whatever.

-s

By: Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 06:50:14 +0000

Daniel,

Excellent post!

It is interesting if LinkedIn is adding this restriction to its countless others. For a social networking site that requires, in its User Agreement, that you only connect with people you know, the option to personalize the invitation was always an option. I always thought that that was weird…after all, if you were trying to get back in touch with someone that you knew, wouldn’t it make sense to allow you to personalize the invitation?

I am hoping that this is just a temporary glitch, as have some other problems been in the past. I can’t see how LinkedIn can try to monetize the customization of invitation messages…it just doesn’t make sense.

- Neal Schaffer

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:44:00 +0000

Like Wyclef says to Shakira, “No fighting!”

Stefano, that’s a good point–this may be an indirect monetization strategy. But in that case they’d do well to announce it–no point in pushing a freemium model unless people know what you’re up-selling. I give them the benefit of the doubt and see this as a misguided way to fight spam. Or a bug.

By: Whit Andrews

Whit Andrews — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 21:52:14 +0000

With you on this one, Daniel. I much prefer invitations saying something like, “It was fun to be on that panel at SIGIR. Wow, you’re smart, and you have a great left hook!”

By: Stefano Bernardi

Stefano Bernardi — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 20:16:57 +0000

That’s just to have more people sign up for their premium services and use the otherwise useless InMail.