LinkedIn is dead to me

UPDATE: My bad, I was wrong on this. As Michael Bertsein and Asbjørn Addasaconnection Ulsberg pointed out, I needed to use the small, tucked away "Add them as a connection" link to add this person. I guess this is merely deceptive on the part of LinkedIn. Although I’m not exactly sure what the difference is between that link and the "Contact Directly" button, it seems to be just anti-user-friendly, not quite as bad as I first thought.

…

Ok so I realize that LinkedIn is struggling to find a way to monetize their site, but… For the first time in a while I looked somebody up on LinkedIn today that I’d worked with a while back. They had a profile, excellent! What an easy way to get back in touch, right? So I clicked the "Contact Directly" button, and I got the following message:

Say what? I have to PAY to contact them? This is the antithesis of a social network if I ever heard one. So let me get this straight… you ARE a social network, your main function is to CONNECT people, and yet you’re asking me to PAY to contact somebody? LinkedIn, I think you’re getting yourself confused with a headhunter.

No thanks, and I won’t be using LinkedIn for THAT again.

Share and Enjoy:

http://michaelbernstein.com Michael Bernstein

You need to use the smaller 'Add them as a connection' link instead of the 'Contact Directly' button.
Asbjørn Ulsberg

Yea, this is annoying. But as Michael writes, you need to click the smaller, almost invisible link, to add people to your contact network. What the huge "Contact Directly" button does is contacting people through the LinkedIn mail system, while with "Add x as connection" you need to know the e-mail address of the person you contact to get in touch with him/her.

It's an annoyance, but it only applies when you do random searches for people. When you connect to former colleagues and such, invitations are sent automatically through LinkedIn and you don't need to know any e-mail addresses. So if you find another less random way to get in touch with people, LinkedIn works great, but with random searches, it only works for those who pays.
http://michaelbernstein.com michael bernstein

"Although I'm not exactly sure what the difference is between that link and the "Contact Directly" button, it seems to be just anti-user-friendly, not quite as bad as I first thought."

The difference is simple: the 'Contact Directly' assumes you do *not* already know the person, but want to contact them anyway. For this, you have to pay (yes, part of their business model is 'pay to spam).

More generally though, 'adding someone as a connection' is assumed to just be entering into their system an *existing* relationship, for which you just need to provide a valid email address (and which they need to confirm).