Looks like the controversy over LinkedIN's new features is dying down. I hope Konstantin's interview on this blog was helpful to some. When he explains the WHY of the new features, they just make so much sense:

Being a viral site, isn't it stupid to limit invitations, as you recently announced you would do?Since each connection on LinkedIn means you need to be willing to introduce your connection whenever he or she wants to reach someone you or your contacts know, we never thought people would want to have more than a few hundred connections. While our user agreement clearly spells out that you may only invite people who know you and invitees have a button to report users who invited them and who they don't know, we learned that a small group of our users (less than 0.01% of our user base) was using the invitation mechanism to "get to know people." They didn't mean any harm, but we received a lot of complaints, and users asked us why we let them invite so many people in the first place. We realized we should be more pro-active, and when we looked at the data, we found that people who sent out more than 3,000 invitations were much more likely to draw complaints, and so we made that the default invitation limit. When users reach that limit and they want to send more invitations, they can request the cap to be raised, and we can then look into their track record of whether most people accepted their invitations and if there were more than a couple of people who complained about receiving invitations from this individual. This puts less of a burden on our user base to report people who violate the user agreement, and I think it will make people select more carefully whom they invite to connect. This applies to both free as well as paying members. Privacy is non-negotiable.

Look, I know where the power users were coming from... When you've invested THAT much time in building a network, it would really stink to be limited.

However, it's not like you're losing the people you've already collected AND if you aren't spamming people, which I hope everyone agrees is wrong, then you can request an appeal and keep the ability to add.

I really think that if they hadn't done this right now, they'd have ended up ruining the entire network. I have already had friends leave LinkedIN for all the spam...

Of course, everyone's idea of spam in LinkedIN is different, but I think the guidelines Konstantin mentioned are pretty generous, IMO. The only thing I might have done differently is warn a little in advance of the change.

As a LinkedIN user that is active, but not a power user, these changes don't affect me personally, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I really hope to see this completely resolved amicably. Many of the people behind the LinkedIN Lions are great people...