1. Liz Lawley on January 27, 2004 5:08 PM writes...

It's up a little for me, too.

2. Ben Hammersley on January 27, 2004 6:22 PM writes...

er, yes, actually, me too. Another three in three days.

3. Adam Greenfield on January 27, 2004 8:27 PM writes...

Roger that - including two requests to be added as a contact from complete strangers. Methinks the LinkedIn meme is getting around to people who aren't quite grasping the essence of the proposition.

4. michael sippey on January 27, 2004 9:30 PM writes...

It's up for me, as well. Invitations from three folks that I wouldn't have pegged to be LinkedInSters. There's such rich data to be mined by the SNS... What's the growth curve of your network look like? What's the relation between network size and pass-along introduction requests? What's the average pass-along request rate of different node sizes? What's the mean-time to request approval by node sizes? Etc., etc. (Some of this is commercially interesting, others just interesting interesting.)

5. Yong Su Kim on January 28, 2004 2:51 AM writes...

It's up for me as well. I think that the recent entry of Google/Orkut and the surrounding buzz has increased the awareness of social networking. I'm sure many people went to sign up for Orkut after reading the news articles and discovered that they needed to be invited. LinkedIn and others seem to be the beneficiary.

6. Ton Zijlstra on January 28, 2004 1:29 PM writes...

I was approached amongst others by Thomas Power, the founder of Ecademy, a heavily UK oriented networking portal. Maybe LinkedIn use is up because Ecademists are entering LinkedIn. Just guessing though. The way of connecting on Ecademy however resembles using buckshot more than looking for fewer but effective connections.

7. Marc Canter on January 28, 2004 2:39 PM writes...

I've gotten 12 this morning alone. Over 50 since Orkut stirred the pot.

8. Julio Alonso on January 29, 2004 9:39 AM writes...

I am in the periphery of the linkedin service (being in Spain) and I have also seen a significant rise in activity (new adds, spontaneous contacts and so on), in the last few days.

9. John Krystynak on January 30, 2004 1:37 PM writes...

I'd guess that the mailing they did
to highlight the uploading of your contact
files is increasing their usage. It probably has
a delayed "network" effect - If I upload my contacts and send out 10 invitations, then next month those people that joined will be doing the same.

I don't know when they introduced the upload,
but it re-kindled my own interest in maintaining
my LinkedIn network...

It's a good feature to help LinkedIn get past the early-adopter phase.

10. Peter Caputa IV on February 2, 2004 1:27 PM writes...

We've also noticed a rise in whizspark registrations. Not sure what to attribute it to.

11. Konstantin Guericke on March 3, 2004 1:34 AM writes...

We hit an inflection point in mid-November. In terms of usage of the request system, that has really hit its stride since early February. Basically, every week, more than 3,000 contact requests get made.

The number of forwarding requests even for heavy connectors is quite reasonable (1-2 per day). We are also seeing some self-adjusting where people who invited people who they are not really willing to recommend and now are reconsidering their connection now that person and their frieds send requests their way.

I think whether it is a joy or a bother to forward requests on behalf of your connections is directly related to the strength of your relationships with the connections. So, people wh have kept their Connections list clean, are in a good spot.

Over-inviting is starting to happen, but we try not to be dracionian, but let the existing social feedback loops do their thing. However, we are looking at ways to tune it, so that some of our VIPs (celebrity reporters, well-known VCs) don't get swamped by invites.

One of the first steps was the ingore invitation option. More to come--we're testing a variety of solutions.

-Konstantin