Laurent’s blog

LinkedIn tries to make us trip, spam our contacts

Today I was trying to send a few connection requests to contacts made during Web 2.0 last month when I realized that LinkedIn changed its process for importing contacts.

Before I was able to view exclusively contacts from my address book that were on LinkedIn but to which I had not yet connected with. It was very practical and this was a way to make sure I was not too intrusive or request people to sign-up for something they are not already using. (And frankly, I don’t know why someone that came to Web 2.0 would not be using LinkedIn already.)

Today I realized the interface had changed. You now need to choose a letter from A-Z while LI displays all contacts that starts with that letter and pre-select all contacts. The ones on LinkedIn and the ones that are not. Which means that, if you don’t take notice of this update, while you browse your address book you keep adding contacts to the right-hand side! Making it a breeze to invite a whole lot of people you were not planing to.

Result. I’m sure there is more, but the only reason I can think of why they did this is because they want to force people into inviting non-LinkedIn users to the network. Its probably a sign that the network is growing more with internal connections than new contacts (I remember reading a blog post on this a while back but can’t locate it now). But the real result is that where it use to be painless to browse and select contacts, its now painful and risky!