LinkedIn goes Jigsaw

LinkedIn has unofficially announced the start of InMail. InMail gives LinkedIn users a second route to reach recipients:

"InMail will deliver the message directly to the intended recipient, and InMail recipients can choose whether or not to disclose their name and contact info to the sender based on the request, the profile of the sender, etc.. InMail recipients will also see how many of the last 10 InMails from the sender were accepted vs. declined. InMail will also be available to contact people three degrees away (but not two degrees away)."

InMail will also let you search through the whole network not just your connections. InMail will be only available by subscription.

However many limits remain:

"InMail should be offloading the number of introductions people have to make on behalf of their connections. Also, we will be limiting personal networks to 3 degrees---this should also reduce the number of introductions people need to make and will avoid the discomfort of making introductions where you know neither the sender or receiver. When someone is asking for an introduction to someone three degrees away, as the introducer, you will always know either the sender or the receiver and the other person will be a friend-of-a-friend.

InMail will by default be batched, so members will receive InMail at most twice a week. There will be the option to only read InMail only on the LinkedIn site and to not be shown in LinkedIn Network results and to not receive contacts via InMail. Pricing will be announced when we launch next month."

I did mention this earlier here - I feel Jigsaw is the first breed of tools that has discovered the full revenue potential in Social Networking. You may not like it but its straightforward approach to share data that have value and charging for it while maintaining a community approach is very valuable.

InMail is pretty late considering that LinkedIn is around since 2003 and has for my taste far too many limitations with that new service. I can totally understand why they have built these in coming from a different approach. So I'm curious to see how it works out for LinkedIn!