I had an associate with a free LinkedIn account contact me  late last week complaining about how he could no longer see the full names of his LinkedIn search results for 3rd degree connections – his results only showed the first initial of the last name. Furthermore, he claimed that LinkedIn had started charging for the ability to see the full names of 3rd degree connections in search results.

My first reaction was extreme confusion.

I hadn’t heard or seen anything to support his experience or claims. Had I missed a major announcement or blog post? Not one of the few thousand+ recruiters that I follow on Twitter had tweeted about it, at least not that I saw, but it’s safe to assume that if this person’s claims were accurate, news would spread like wildfire.

Interestingly, I just ran a search on Twitter (@4:00 EST 10/3/2010) for [LinkedIn last names] and only found 1 tweet that could be possibly referencing it. Certainly odd if this massive change from LinkedIn really was taking root. Continue reading →