Getting Ready for LinkedIn to charge for basic services

During the last few weeks, LinkedIn has made it more difficult to message members in the same groups.  Many people have figured out that the best thing about LinkedIn was joining groups where you could connect to your hiring manager.  I also would look on advanced people search to message/connect with recruiters in the area.  Now when I go back to reconnect to those that failed to accept the invite, I need their email address to send them a message.  Either I have to upgrade or wait until LinkedIn changes the rules somewhat back to how it was before.

Here are some of the blog messages about this change in messaging (Ian is the LinkedIn responder):

@Ian- I am having a problem sending messages to other group members. It is only showing the In Mail option, not the Send a Message option. I know this same glith happened about a month ago. Can you have someone look in to this? Anyone else having the problem?

Another commentor:

Deb- Thanks but no, it's not just a single member or some of the members. If I run a People search, then go down through all the results I can't send messages to any of the people I share groups with other than the ones I am first tier connected to.

Another commentor:

Yes the same for me in my groups as I wanted to highlight something to a select bunch through my group and now can't!! in fact have seen that I can't send messages to anyone who shares any groups with me and also I can't forward the profile of someone on to a 3rd party !!! hoping just a glitch and not LI pushing us even further down a Premium paid service.

Another commentor:

I could be wrong, but I think that Linkedin IS disallowing the email to other group member functions. You can kind of see why - a user can join the top twenty groups and that would cover a huge amount of people. They then don't have to use the inMail and premium features of Linkedin... If Linkedin is going to grow their revenues, I expect them to more severely restrict the ability for one user to message another.

That being said, if they completely bar group members from messaging each other, it eliminates a very important use of the group - networking privately between members. I would hope that they do not completely eliminate the option, but rather restrict it. I'm sure what they are worried about "mass" communications - not the regular one-off important messages.

I would hope Linkedin could make up some type of restriction for a user, like "not over 25 messages a day to other group members" for example. Additionally, I would hope they have another condition for group owners - for example, sending no more than 250 messages, etc.

A clarification to my point - it seems like at this moment, group owners cannot message their own group members. This would be a real problem from an administrative standpoint.

Another commentor:

This has been rolling out for a few weeks now (based on questions I've seen in the Answers area) and my account has been now hit with it this morning. The most frequent complaints about groups is that there are either too many inactive/low-activity groups or groups that are over-run with spam, thus one of the main selling points of joining a group was the ability to send messages and/or connect with those group members. I am guessing that messaging will now only be available to paid subscribers. One can apparently still "reply privately" to posts made by members to the group, but some members prefer to lurk.

@Miles I agree it would be better to put a cap on the number of messages sent to group members. While I have found some good groups, most are fairly worthless aside from the ability to have the potential ability to message or connect someone down the road.

Another comment from a premium subscriber:

I am a paid subscriber and still cannot message individuals that I share a group with and cant either to members of the group I run. I am the owner of a group just dedicated to the Security Cleared Contractors community in the UK. We fully vet our members and have only grown to 8500 in the two years we have been running. If I had adopted the anyone is welcome policy yes I would have had over 100,000 members by now. We also dont have recruitment functions within and the discussions whilst only number a few a day generate an excellent response and actively encourage members to participate. I cannot see what Linkedin are proposing by removing the ability to message people within the group!!!!! Is this not a NETWORKING GROUP. What with limitations of the number of announcements we can send and now this in addition to the withdrawal of email addresses at the time of request to join I am begining to think is the time invested in running these groups worthwhile. 

I suspect that we'll be seeing something new soon, or group managers will discontinue managing the groups.