cjuon's dashboard

After reaching the limit and being forced to reconsider what are my most important 50 groups... And after reconsidering some of the points in this thread, it seems like there are a few plausible solutions:

1) Make the ability to join more than 50 groups part of a LinkedIn paid membership. Even if you only allowed me to join only a small number of additional groups, that would be far preferable to having to chose which associations to drop. As an added bonus, it creates a revenue stream for you to begin covering the server infrastructure. (Personally, I consider groups part of my resume, which is what this service started out as; I'd roll back some of the recent feature additions and return to providing solid core functionality...) I had a paid membership for awhile but it didn't provide features I actually *needed*; however, a feature like this would be something worth paying for.

2) Change the group functionality, and insist that moderators approve members of groups based on real-world certifications or paid memberships. This would (unfortunately) create a lot of unhappy people too, but it's my hunch that these affinity groups are the ones that grow exponentially and strain your servers - and they already have an alternative home - on facebook. You encourage LinkedIn members to connect to only real-world connections; why not carry that over to groups?

3) Charge groups to use LinkedIn. If they find it valuable, they will pay and you will have another revenue stream to support IT infrastructure. What you're creating now is a reason for groups to leave LinkedIn, if their real-world paid members are unable to join because of the 50 group limit.

4) As previously pointed out, consider simply penalizing abusers of the system. Twitter does this - not always perfectly, so they've gone through some rough spots - but they make corrections when they make mistakes - and more importantly, they don't penalize the faithful user base and evangelists for the mistakes of the few.

As someone who passionately recommends LinkedIn as a social network that anyone with a business card should join because I’ve seen the benefits, I sincerely hope you share specific plans for addressing this issue soon. – cjuon, on September 27, 2009 04:24

Same issue - after over a decade of networking I have been a part of MANY groups. I was shocked to see a warning that I'm close to my "limit". Many of the groups I'm in are for professional certifications - should I drop those? Should I drop the ones I'm on the board of? Should I drop the ones my customers are managing and want me to keep an eye on? If they are closed networks that require an approval to join, how does LinkedIn need to police beyond that? This is heartbreaking - it stops me from doing my job.

Yes! Knowing which people are already following needs to visible from the inbox - right now it takes a couple clicks on each person who sends you a message if you don't happen to remember if that person is following you or not.

Ha! I do this too, more times than I care to admit. ;-)

Is this not available in the upgrade? This is the kind of biz feature that's worth paying for, because you simply have to have more than one admin if an agency is part of the equation. (Add the client, then give them ability to add others, etc.)

I hate to admit it, but I've done the same thing. Perhaps a usability issue?

It would be great to know if this feature is a month away or 6 months away to know what work-arounds to use, as I don't want to hand out the user name and password to aTwitter account just because someone is already using Hootsuite. It clearly defeats the purpose of having an admin feature and is honestly a reason to look at similar tools if it won't be fixed soon. Thanks in advance for any guidance you can provide, as I'm otherwise a fan of your service!