LinkedIn revives ‘contact list download’ feature a day after removing it

While it is easy to add new connections to LinkedIn, either directly or by using third-party services to import contact lists, it has become hard to export the connections again. In a page describing the new process, LinkedIn says users will receive an email within 72 hours with a link to download the archive when it is ready. Given that LinkedIn quietly removed the feature, users didn’t realize it had been pulled and took to, among other places, Twitter with their questions.

LinkedIn users are finding that getting the email address of their friends and business associates emails is now three times the hassle. It is not clear what the form future changes will take or when they might be implemented. Effective immediately, we have turned the CSV download link back on.

They also said that their goal is to make as much of the information, including connection information, available within minutes. We will keep the CSV connections tool available until we can reach that goal (some other data items will be available in an extended archive that may take longer to process). They will then turn off the tool again as a part of their ongoing efforts. In few more weeks, users can expect to have another update just to make it hard for the third parties who are scraping data of LinkedIn members. The company will cut that back down to one when the data archive takes minutes and not days.

LinkedIn confirmed the removal of the feature through a tweet, saying that users “can still request [a] copy of your LI data, incl 1st degree conns”, a new method it has detailed on a “Help” page updated earlier today.

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network on the internet, with more than 259 million members worldwide, including executives from Fortune 500 companies.

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