Then:
- Receive an e-mail in your inbox informing that there is someone who wants to connect with you on openBC.
- Visit openBC “Confirm Contacts” page to check who it is and what their note says.
- If I want to connect with them and send them a message, I click on “Confirm with message” [ great feature - LinkedIn could do well to include a confirm with message ]
- Next window with options on what contact information should be made available to the new contact used to open – the top of the list had the checkbox which allowed me to check “all”. Very convenient.
- Next window allowed me to compose and send this person a message.
Now:
- The check “all” checkbox has gone and I have to individually check all the [ more than 15 ] checkboxes.
I hate it so much that I’m thinking I don’t want to be doing this more than once in two weeks [ who wants to check so many boxes for confirming ONE contact? ]
Bad move [ I wonder why they did it? ]
UPDATE: 12th February 2006
Sorry for the late update, but the issue was resolved almost immediately by the vey proactive openBC developer team. It was a browser issue affecting Ie users and has now been put to rest. Check the comments for more details.
January 29th, 2006
In the latest LinkedIn update, each persons number of contacts [ people with more than 500 contacts ] are no longer visible as accurate numbers. All you see [ whether you're connected or not ] is “+500″.
If you are connected to the person then you can see all their contacts [ if they have kept their contacts list open ] but you will have to manually count how many there are.
My first reaction was “Good, now we will have more serious networkers – not people who just want to connect because of the numbers. Thank heavens – why didn’t LinkedIn think of this earlier!”
I get quite a few requests to connect every week and many of them want to connect only because of the number of my contacts [ +820 currently 
]. So I will hopefully no longer have annoying requests to connect where people copy and paste the previous invitation without even changing the name.
The above reaction was for the QUALITY side of the networking game.
Then of course was the other aspect : the QUANTITY part.
Will I still be able to increase and expand my reach at the same rate? [ Every new contact brings in at least a handful of people I would not have had access to previously ].
The +500 feature does take off the burden from the mega-connectors, but they themselves do not feel happy about the implementation. One reason I believe would be that they have invested a lot of time and effort in building those large networks of more than 20,000 direct contacts and that is one reason why more and more new people want to be their direct contacts. They have sowed the seeds and have started reaping the rewards and now LinkedIn has taken away their very leverage.
The Quality Vs. Quantity debate is a never-ending one because there are so many people and everyone has a different opinion. What we need to realize is that both these qualities support each other. There will be no quality without quantity and no quantity without quality – because quality attracts quantity and quantity allows you to choose and set your level of quality.
I now feel that LinkedIn would do well by reversing this change.
Of course people are not going to quit LinkedIn only because of this change – but it will help LinkedIn gather their member base faster. They do brag on their main-page about the 4.8 million people – so I’m wondering why they would implement a feature that will potentially reduce networking exchanges on LinkedIn.
It is about choice. The customer needs to feel that he/she has a choice. And the +500 takes away that choice. To keep things fair to people who want to avoid people pestering them to connect just because they have a large number of contacts, LinkedIn could give a choice to members to implement the +500 if they wanted. So the mega-connectors could pick and choose depending on their needs and requirements.
Why should the networks and members be forced to accept a change because LinkedIn is not able to manage the Spam and abuse reports?
January 28th, 2006
For the people concentrating on quantity while networking [ and even those concentrating on quality ], LinkedIn’s numbers have been climbing steadily.
This is what my numbers look like on my LinkedIn Dashboard:
With 4.8 million people on LinkedIn, what bothers me is the actual number of people who are “using” the LinkedIn platform. There are quite a few profiles that don’t seem to have been touched since a long time and then there are those profiles that give the impression that the person has been working at all the Fortune 500 companies there are.
I wish LinkedIn was a little more open about their statistics so that networkers who actually put the system to use were able to calculate whether their networking was helping their business or not.
January 27th, 2006
I had no idea this kind of functionality existed on simplyHired!
Notice the bottom left corner button that reads “in Who do I know?”. It allows me to check out if I know someone at that company and can help me out with the job. [ but the problem is that post people DO NOT like being approached for such needs - if I already knew the person then it's ok of course - which then encourages me toconnect with everyone - not necessarily people I know, which cancels out LinkedIn's primary drive to encourage users to connect only if we know who we are connecting to. ]
Just an observation.
January 24th, 2006
I’ve just signed up for Jambo.
Naina’s DiscoverMe Page is where you can read my Jambo profile.
At the outset it seems geared more towards social networking – but could work for business networking too. But I’m not sure how it helps in the flood of already existing similar technologies. Sure it works with Wireless – but I’m in India – how’s wireless going to help my case? But then most software/technologies are not designed for developing countries anyway 
I’ve created my profile and now I have to look for and add friends – then Jambo will seek them out if they are close to me and send me some kind of message so that I can then get in touch with them. One scenario I can think of – and I maybe wrong – I’m sitting in the waiting lounge of the airport and working on my laptop, Jambo is on – suddenly it pings me that someone I know from LinkedIn or openBC is in the vicinity – it will tell me who it is and then I could probably stand up on my chair and holler out their name if I don’t know what they look like  Or I could send them a message on Jambo and tell them where I am…
January 24th, 2006
