Image by jhhwild via Flickr

[Note: Approximately 24 hours after I wrote this blog post, LinkedIn Events reappeared on LinkedIn as mysteriously as it had disappeared.  Other than a tweet or a response to a customer service request, there was never any "official" word from LinkedIn as to what happened...]

Poor old LinkedIn Events.  I wrote back on April Fool’s Day how LinkedIn was very mysterious in how they branded and placed their Applications in their user interface.  For instance, Events was the Application that was never accessible by selecting “Applications” from the left-hand navigation bar.  Which raised the question, is LinkedIn Events a LinkedIn Application or not?

As I wrote my LinkedIn Book, I realized how valuable an Application LinkedIn Events was for anyone who was hosting any type of event, and I ended up devoting several pages to it.  As someone who hosts networking events for LinkedIn Groups, the value of LinkedIn Events was immediate.  And the viral nature through which it can help advertise your events was also something that I felt many people did not realize.

So you can imagine how shocked I was today when I logged on to LinkedIn today to see the RSVP count for my upcoming LinkedIn Event the day-after-tomorrow and noticed that the Event application was missing.  It was completely taken off LinkedIn.  I went to the link for my event, and that too had disappeared.  How can a key functionality be completely deleted from a social networking platform like LinkedIn used by almost 50 million people without any notification, beforehand or after the fact?

And this is the issue with LinkedIn or any other Web 2.0 platform: the industry is in flux.  Functionalities can be deleted at whim, although LinkedIn is notorious for doing this without any explanation, rhyme, or reason.

The problem, though, is that LinkedIn now wants us to use their paid service and entrust them into saving all of our contact information with their new “Profile Organizer” (which I will review on a separate blog post).  But if I paid money to use their service and then had one of the key features, like Events, deleted, doesn’t this raise a major issue of people rightfully demanding their money back from LinkedIn?  And can I trust LinkedIn, or any other web platform, with my precious information?

Clearly there are sites like Salesforce.com that are of high integrity and have a robust platform that make us feel comfortable in entrusting them.  But what about the case of LinkedIn?

What do you think?

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