vendredi, juin 23, 2006

Dinosaurs demise Part II: mega-networker twilight

Once LinkedIn has been established as a serious and widely adopted online business tool, there came the problem of becoming profitable and fix complaints by spammed users. Here are 2 steps that have been implemented addressing these concerns.

1st step: cutting visibility from 4 to 3 levels (summer 2005).

Goal was to improve profitability by being able to sell new features such as the openlink.

Openlink makes the problem of being separated irrelevant: you’re accessible by almost anyone. But if you have 4 levels of visibility, provided that you havea few dizains of connections, you are also accessible by everyone.

2nd step: limit mega-networkers activity (winter 2006).

Goal was, and still is, to avoid some annoying side effects due to mega-networkers activity.

These mega-networking side effects are listed below:

  • high: sometimes do some borderline spamming to collect new connections and thus being an annoyance to other regular users.
  • high: spoil the network by removing all signification to the chain of trust between users.
  • low: non paying privilege access due to number of connections

Concretely limiting mega-networking activity is done by:

  • number of connections are not displayed above 500.
  • users are not allowed to send more than 3000 invitations.

Having more than 5000 connections become almost impossible with the 3000 invitations cap.

There are still other steps to be taken to get people stop cheating and to get rid of the mega-networkers in order to be a spam free online business networking tool.

I will expose these other steps in part III.

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