General Musing: Barack Obama not welcome on #LinkedIn?

I'm a great fan of LinkedIn, although it still has some issues. The 2008 report on Social Network Downtime from pingdom states:

"LinkedIn's downtime has been increasing over the year. Each quarter has seen a larger amount of downtime than the one before it. 63% of its downtime
took place during the second half of 2008."

"LinkedIn seems to be on a trend toward increasing amounts of downtime, [...] and even clearer in the quarterly breakdown. 63% of its downtime took place during the second half of 2008."

LinkedIn is suffering under it's own success, as can be seen in the statistics below the number of daily visitors to the LinkedIn website is increasing steadily. Downtime caused by visitors that could easily be solved with more machines and better caching for the users with 10 or 20+ connections. It's not those users who are causing most of the problems according to sources within LinkedIn. The users who are causing the problems are users who are part of the TopLinkedIn Top 50, and users such as Barack Obama, who has 25,000+ connections. LinkedIn just wasn't designed with open networkers, such as those, in mind and it was certainly not designed to cope with Super Connectors such as Barack Obama. LinkedIn recently put in place a cap on the number of connections that a LinkedIn subscriber can have, even on the number of contacts you can have in your personal address book or on the number of groups you can join.

Facebook and Twitter had such virtual caps in place before Robert Scoble broke through the barrier, and LinkedIn should be happy that Scoble isn't a LinkedIn super connector like Barack Obama. At one point, people with 500+ connections were deemed to have a lot of connections - but now there are many with 1,000, 2,000 or 5,000 connections - and this number is increasing every day.

An uproar similar to the one that recently occurred on FaceBook was quashed by LinkedIn in the last part of 2008, business networkers don't have the time to organize like social networkers. Yet they are facing issues similar to social networkers. And to cap it all Barack Obama will no longer be able to accept your invitation to connect once he hits the 30,000 mark.

And the list of issues that LinkedIn's customers are facing is growing:

Poor Customer Service
Architectural / Site performance issues
Inconsistencies & unavailability with various parts of the site
Group limitations (There are so many groups one can belong to - and get invited to)
Group size limitations (Groups are leaving LinkedIn and setting up shop in other locations)
Security (Needing to login and then supply a captcha to make it difficult to automatically download your own contacts list)
Identity theft issues (At present, anyone can create a profile in any name - many pretending to be celebrities, politicials, etc)

Personally I believe the issues with LinkedIn's downtime will continue if they don't look at their architecture and prepair for the future. It may all be working today, but what about tomorrow or next week?