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Once Again, Unpredictability of Social Networks

February 10th, 2009 · 3 Comments

Yesterday Facebook today LinkedIn

Yesterday I posted about Facebook changing the rules without notice, ending the polling function and deleting the polling data we had paid for in our account. (We still haven’t heard back from Facebook CS).

Last night LinkedIn did something similar, though arguably less significant. If you were visiting the Next Gen Market Research group on LinkedIn last night/this morning you mayt have noticed that my profile image was missing from my profile as well as every single group post and Q&A.

I got an email from fellow Next Gen Research Group member Nelson Davis asking what had happened to my profile image. I checked and sure enough it had been deleted. Nelson knew exactly what had happened. LinkedIn had deleted is previous profile image as well, because it contained an image with him and his fiancée.

Apparently LinkedIn feels the only appropriate image to use on your profile is a real picture which clearly shows only one person, yourself. I would assume a police arrest picture would be ok if you have one. Apparently the caricature I was using below is somehow offensive:

I was able to upload it again this morning. Will see if it gets deleted again.

If LinkedIn felt the need to delete my profile picture they could have at least sent me a notice stating that they had done so with a reason why.

Yet another example of things can change with a moment’s notice on Social Networks.

Tom

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Tags: Branding · CGM · Linkedin · Networking · SEO · SNS · Social networks · facebook · web 3.0

3 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 10, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    Curious to hear, has a social network or CGM provider changed the rules on you in some unexpected way?

  • 2 Sam Berteloot // Feb 10, 2009 at 4:03 pm

    Isn’t this procedure based on complaints of other users? If I remember right that was also the case with Nelsons picture?

    Cheer, Sam

  • 3 Tom H C Anderson // Feb 10, 2009 at 4:41 pm

    Sam, I’m not sure, that may very well be the case. But that has proven to be a very poor type of feedback tool. This type of feedback was originally used to combat spam on search engines. So if someone mad multiple submissions of say a certain domain/url quickly that domain would be penalized. However it proved way too easy to abuse. Picture a webmaster at Dell entering multiple HP UR;s to get HP banned by Google. You get the idea…

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