Give me no warning and make it hard to understand

eMail from LinkedIn, December 11, 2012

Yesterday I received this eMail from LinkedIn. For some reason the firm has decided that offering me a link to my blog is not a useful thing. Not useful for whom?

And when I click on the link and head over to the "Help Center" on the LinkedIn site, the information I see is confusing and pretty useless.

But the worst part is that this email is a great big fat lie. There are now fewer ways to "tell my professional story at LinkedIn" not more.

Facebook has been driving commercial users away with its policy, and charges, on sponsored posts. Is LinkedIn doing the same sort of thing? By exerting a greater degree of control about how your customers use the site, and removing flexibility that they previously had, are you eliminating some of the very reasons that they joined your site in the first place?

It will be interesting to see how customers react to these changes, or if I'm just an old curmudgeon.