My issue with LinkedIn...
Social sites are supposed to be just that social. It doesn't matter if you are LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace. It seems though that LinkedIn doesn't want you to be too social though.
It all started last year when LinkedIn decided to publish a group directory. Those who had taken the time to create a number of groups had to delete them in order to come down to the new limits of owning only 50 groups. There is also a hidden limit that many users aren't aware of. There is a limit on how many members a group has as well.
What I don't understand is why LinkedIn tries to limit not only how many groups you can be a part of, but the size of the groups too. There is no rhyme or reason to it either.
Some groups have literally thousands of members while others that LinkedIn doesn't like are limited to 1000 members. It seems to me that it shouldn't be up to LinkedIn to limit any membership to a particular group. The idea of a social networking site is to network. Limiting members of a group is contrary to that very notion.
There should be no limits on group ownership or on how many members a group can have. Let the network grow, instead of constraining it for no reason.
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Were I to develop LinkedIn, I'd probably limit the group size to something small, too. I mean, LinkedIn is supposed to be about people you actually know and have met or have some other actual relationship with, right?
By that premise, a generic group like "Programmers" or even "ColdFusion Programmers" really has no meaning. You'd need to define a group that was relevant to the people you actually knew and interacted with, not just people who are on your feed reader. Maybe it's locality-specific like "Central Florida CF Programmers", or interest-specific like "Model-Glue Gurus", or something along those lines. Point being, in theory, you should personally know the vast majority of the people in the group and they should know you.
Under such direction, groups larger than 250 or so people would be the exception, not the rule. I'd venture to say that most groups would have no more than a few dozen people.
You'd have far more groups, but the groups would be more meaningful to the LinkedIn context and would be a better model for actual social interaction.
My point is that LinkedIn shouldn't be determining who should or shouldn't be able to join a group. That should be up to the group managers to control who joins and how many members a group should have.