How Many Groups Can I Join?

Until today this was an easy question to answer: as many as you want. However, today LinkedIn informed me that there will now be a maximum of 50 groups per person. The official E-Mail reads like this:

“We are in the process of adding new functionality to enhance the experience of Groups, including the recent release of a searchable directory. We are also working with our development teams to bring new tools and widgets to this collaborative space throughout the rest of 2008. We are also at this time making some changes to the user-created groups we host. These changes include adding a limit to the number of user-created groups any LinkedIn member may be part of at one time. Currently we are setting that limit at membership in 50 (fifty) user-created groups.”

I personally have no problem with this policy, as the added functionality should make group membership even more valuable. However, I was shocked when they told me that I was a member of 90+ groups and needed to get this down to 50 or else! I thought that there must be a mistake, but indeed this is what happened. It was actually a good experience looking at all of the groups and deciding which ones really mattered to me. Even for someone with a lot of personal and professional interests, it actually was not hard choosing which groups meant the most to me.

Anyways, in the future, please be aware of this new limitation.

(Additional Thoughts)

Since I wrote the above post there have been many loyal and hardcore LinkedIn members who have cried about this limitation, but combined with the new Search capabilities and Discussion boards, I believe it is now much easier to find, join, and communicate within groups.  If you really think about what your objectives are in joining groups, and you look at membership numbers as well as each group’s objective, you should be able to easily narrow down your group membership numbers as I have.  For instance, there is a Gmail users group…do you intened to connect with other Gmail users to exchange information or do you just want access to a group with large membership numbers?  If you are looking for membership numbers, just enter the search button on Group Search with an empty text box and you can confirm what the most popular groups are in descending order of membership.  Until now you had no idea of how many people were in each group until joining, and even then your search results were limited to 500.  So thank you LinkedIn for this additional functionality!!!