Really though, it is a great solution. Something I read somewhere that makes a lot more sense is that if these sites are going to have policies like this, aside from posting them as policies so that we understand what’s going on (Harry claims that he had no idea he was doing anything wrong), how about if the system doesn’t allow you to upload 4,600 invites?

In other words, put a message that says “you can only invite 100 people this week/month” … and leave it at that… instead of getting banned right away. The system should be smart enough to keep us out of trouble, instead of assume that we are going to be intimately with the policies (that are probably changing regularly) and keep ourselves out of trouble, especially if they appear to do something like give us enough rope to hang ourselves with.

I did a recent post about sending batch LinkedIn invitations in which I pointed out:

Most important thing, though, is not to send 3,700 invitations, and not send the ones you do choose to send all at once using a generic boilerplate invitation. LinkedIn makes it far too easy to do that, and then the current rules end up basically punishing most people for what they made it easy for you to do.

And therein lies the problem. It pains me to say it, but LinkedIn doesn’t really have a very good understanding of the total system dynamics going on here. It seems that feature decisions are being made in isolation without consideration for the impact on other parts of the system, or in light of real-world user behavior.

I think you should be allowed to prevent the errant “I don’t know you” claim with a single line of text explaining how you know the person.

“We’re co-workers” or “I met you at the conference” or something along those lines.

-Chuck
http://www.ihateyourjob.com