Hacking LinkedIn To Speed Up the Invite Process

LinkedIn as a concept is great, but the Invite process is fairly laborious. That is probably why I have 160+ MyBlogLog community members and at time of writing, only 10 connections in LinkedIn.

1. Dig up someone’s email address
2. Add First Name
3. Add Last Name
4. Enter Email
5. Change Message
6. Submit
7. Enter Username and Password

How do I fix that… FAST?

So I had a look at the submission form and wondered if I could hack a one click invite button.

The form uses the POST method, thus nothing appears in the URL bar – POST is actually the correct method because submitting the form changes data.

However that doesn’t necessarily mean that GET wouldn’t work, it just needs converting.

First of all here is a handy little bookmarklet I picked up some time ago. What you do is fill in a form that uses POST, click this bookmarklet to convert the page to GET, and then submit the forum.
in the URL box you will then see a GET instruction URL that can be played with.

I made the emails extremely short – I will know the invites came from my button

I then removed excess data, because I didn’t need this for someone to invite 5 people, I just wanted it so people could invite me quickly if they wanted to.

I tested it inviting myself, and it seems to work, because I received an error message stating that you can’t invite yourself. :)

LinkedIn Fast

I created a nice button

Just Click to Connect

<a href="http://www.linkedin.com/inviteMany?firstName.0=YOURFIRSTNAME&lastName.0=YOURLASTNAME&emailAddress.0=EMAILUSERNAME%40EMAILDOMAINNAME&subject=Join+Me+Now!&salutation=NAME&greeting=invite+for+you&invite=Send+Invitation%28s%29&inviteeID.0=&isMessageOptional=false&default_cell_count=1&contentTemplateID=std_inv_2e"><img src='http://andybeard.eu/wp-content/uploads/linkedin-fast-160x33.png' alt='LinkedIn Fast' /></a><br /><small>Just Click to Connect</small>

Things to Change:-

• YOURFIRSTNAME
• YOURLASTNAME
• EMAILUSERNAME
• EMAILDOMAINNAME

Your mileage may vary, but this seems to work. Licensed under GPL

If there is enough demand, I might make a small code generator for this so it creates the code for you.

Note this doesn’t break the system in any way, but you might get more invites :)

Update: I just received my first LinkedIn Connection using the button, so it certainly works

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