Over the years I have found LinkedIn to be a useful business orientated “social” networking site. In the past year LinkedIn has had to up its game quite a lot as more networking and peer reputation sites have appeared, often with new and interesting innovations.
One of the improvements LinkedIn made was the groups, where motivated individuals could expend their time and energy building affinity and shared interest groups. (Disclosure – I have built several groups on LinkedIn – but am not part of the activists I mention here). When someone joined a group they exposed their email details to the group owner and LinkedIn provided functionality to upload and download contact details.
About a month ago LinkedIn withdrew the ability for group managers to see and contact group members via email. This has caused a lot of consternation for some group managers, who feel their efforts at building and communicating with their groups has been hijacked. More they feel that the way the change was imposed without notice was wrong and all attempts to protest and discuss with LinkedIn have been ignored.
Now, some group owners have started an online petition to have their rights to manage the group as they did initially reinstated. Some of the comments on this site seem reasonable.
This week a number of the groups have effectively closed themselves down, asking members to re-join a new group (some on other platforms, some on LinkedIn) – it remains to see how sucessful a plea to migrate will be with the usually conservative majority.
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