But my confidence dropped to the lowest level a few days ago, when I tried to reach one of my former colleagues – somebody that worked in the same company with me.

This is the option you typically have:

But this is what I got:

So what is inline help saying?

Knowing that you cannot control who is rejecting an invite, and what motive he/she would indicate when rejecting it, indeed you can probably be banned after you get the warnings. (Needles to say, each time I invited somebody that I don’t know personally, I wrote a polite note. It’s in my job description to know how to build online community.)

So I wrote to their customer service to understand how I can get back the full functionality.

Now comes the interesting part and here is exactly what they responded to me:

“everyone is allowed a certain number of Invitations to be sent without requiring an email address to members identified as a “Friend”. After that allotment is depleted you will be required to enter an email address. ”

They also pointed me to their User Agreement (Section 4, sub D), this part:

“LinkedIn may limit the number of connections you may have to other Users and may, in certain circumstances, prohibit you from contacting other Users through use of the Services or otherwise limit your use of the Services”

I’m not a legal expert, and it looks to my understanding that they are legally covered by it.

On the other hand, I think that each of the LinkedIn user must know about this rule which is not clear and actually is hiding this “certain number of Invitations” that nobody knows about it. I would expect to know from the beginning that I’m allowed to send a particular number of invites, and after that, regardless what I do, I have to input an email address there.

My final note: All of us should be aware of the implication of trusting this kind of online social services and be more circumspect when we start to put effort in building an online network.

What to do now? Probably focus my attention to the ones that are still keeping their openness and promises. Google+ perhaps? At least there you can download all your data from your account when you want..

Still, I’m waiting for the open and distributed social network model. There are a few outside, and probably the most important and promising one is Appleseed.

I’ll start to build there! And bye-bye to the ones which are having hidden rules and tries to control you.

—-

PS – Shortly after I mentioned to their support the problem above, I received from LinkedIn an invitation to join for free (for a month) the Pro account… So I deduct from here that all these things happened because they changed rules and they wish to increase the revenue by pushing the LinkedIn power users to pay a Pro account.

And I feel they try to take advantage of me.. Be aware, you can be the next.

Driving to my office in the morning, I started to think what kind of software/technology we need to really improve our lives.

I was thinking on the other side that, because our ego, thousands of good ideas are perishing. Here is how it goes usually: an individual is having an idea that may be brilliant. He is thinking: “Hmm.. this is a great idea! I would like to make money with that, I think it can produce wealth.. I’m not going to tell anybody about it! I’ll try to put it in practice.”

And of course, only a very few succeed. But on the other hand, he is not making his idea public: “Why should other guys take MY idea and become rich instead of ME?”

So we all lose.

For the future, I will try to publish online any idea that crosses my mind and I think is useful. Probably lots exists already and I don’t know about it. But maybe some are not yet there.. Since it is less probably I’ll start up something now – here we go, one more idea ;)

+Zone Legal Online Gaming (yes, is very niche). An online service where you can subscribe and will offer you up to date legal information about all countries and states in the world that are allowing online gaming. We encountered this problem in our company I’m working right now at CapturePlay. Since we are not a big company, we cannot afford an entire team of layers and researchers to pay and to keep us updated with all the regions in the world where we have to interdict or allow people to play our games.

Ideally, this will be a web service to hook into our app and dynamically allow or ban the IPs coming for those regions.

BTW, if you know about a service like this, please let me know, we need it.

OK, that is for today. If I’ll have more time to list, more ideas will be published.

Cheers!

PS – One of my favorite books – Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, is ending like this – To the Wish Machine: “Look into my heart. I know that everything you need is in there. It has to be. I never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! You take from me what it is I want… it just can’t be that I would want something bad! Damn it all, I can’t think of anything, except those words of his… ’HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!’ ”

Deep inside, we are better than we think.

Picture by maximusrex23.

He left this world suddenly on April 8th 2011 at the age of 74. In his lifetime – since his twenties, he painted over one thousand of paintings. The most intense period was in the latest years of his life.

Being my Father, I may be subjective in judging his work. However, in speaking with his colleagues and friends, as well as art critics who attended the funerals, I realized I have a responsibility to publicize his work.

Perhaps his life story, which is an interesting one, has a bearing on this; however, more about this at a later time eventually.

About ten years ago, I had set up a website for his work (http://www.savluc.com/boris).

I didn’t touch it since then, and now is outdated. Therefore we plan to re-build and re-launch it.

In the meantime, we will publish almost daily one of his paintings under different social media outlets. There are hundreds; this will take a few years. We also hope the private owners or organizations that own his paintings, will contribute to it and send us images to be published.

We plan to publish much of his artwork under a Creative Common license, and allow use of his artwork freely, in so far as his paintings would be credited.

We believe this is his final will – to share his art with you, to make this world more colorful and to add to its beauty.

You can follow his published work at:

Twitter: @BorisSavluc

Facebook: Boris Savluc In Memoriam

Flickr: photos/borissavluc

We will continue to keep you updated about this project.

Last but not least:

If you feel a bit of pleasure while looking at his paintings, please let others know about it.

Boris Savluc is not Dead; he is Alive through his Art.

This is the biggest USB hub (at this date). I ordered it some time ago, now I used it, works great.
It has 16 usb ports, and is auto powered. The nice part is the switch, so you can connect two PC and share all the ports.

I ordered it directly in Japan, and here is the link for it. They have other crazy gadgets, you know, Japanese stuff, first hand ;) .

Btw, they ship internationally, as far as I understand.
http://brando.com/