Making new connections has it’s up and downs. On one hand it’s nice to be able to keep in touch with people that one has met. On the other hand it’s a little disconcerting being linked to people one has never met or will likely never meet.

I thought something funny had been happening recently with my LinkedIn Account as I was suddenly receiving emails telling me that I was now connected to Person X – as an example let’s call this latest connection “Mike” (the name has been changed to protect the innocent – or something like that).

At first, I thought my LinkedIn Account was automatically accepting invitations – but this doesn’t appear to be the case and would be odd behaviour for a system like LinkedIn anyway. After all, what would be the point of having a system to manage business “connections” if requests were being automatically accepted?

Then, something interesting turned up.

Looking up my LinkedIn Account Inbox under the Sent Items then “Sent Invitations” there it was – was an invitation to “Mike” plus there was one to “Trevor” – both of whom I have never met nor will ever likely meet. I haven’t made these connection requests – so what is going on?

The first thing I noticed was the date – the invitations to “Mike” and “Trevor” had been sent on the same day. There were a couple of other invites sent on this particular day and it was easy enough to manually “Withdraw” the connection requests but the curious thing is why this happened in the first place especially as “Mike” and “Trevor” are not contacts in my email system.

The next thing I considered was something to do with group memberships particularly as I joined a couple of new groups around that time but neither “Mike” nor “Trevor” share the same groups as me so I feel I can safely rule that one out.

I also checked any third party applications that may be linked to my LinkedIn Account and the only one was Klout but I haven’t checked in to that service for quite some time (and have since de-authorised the account). Whilst in the Account section I also checked the email addresses registered with LinkedIn, there are only two, and sure enough neither “Mike” nor “Trevor” are listed.

However, it is interesting that we both “Mike” and “Trevor” appear to share some connections with me so something odd is going on – the journey continues… I will post more updates here as the investigation progresses.