Those two moves led to the creation of the LION group, which most people agree was officially founded by Christian Mayaud, a venture capitalist who believed firmly in open networking. He started a Yahoo groups site and many followed.

John Evans, another founding member and a UK-based consultant, estimates that today there are approximately 16,000 LION members. Thousands more adhere to similar principles without the official title. According to Evans, during the group's early days, LIONs believed the LinkedIn site changes were the social network's way of contending with explosive growth.

"They [LinkedIn] simply didn't have the money or resources to cope with the speed of growth and demand for support," Evans says. "So, it seemed, they tried to stop network growth and it was around this time that Super-Networkers, as they were once kindly dubbed, began to become pariahs. Wrongly or rightly, many felt that the restrictions were unnecessary and undesirable, and so the LIONs [were established]."

To continue growing their connection lists, LIONs circumvent LinkedIn's restrictions in a few ways. While the service placed the 3,000 limit on how many invitations users can send, it didn't place any cap on how many they can receive. In addition, if you want to connect with someone outside your immediate network, LinkedIn asks you for that person's e-mail address before you can send that person an invitation (a rule designed by LinkedIn to establish that you know the person in question). Since LinkedIn doesn't provide an e-mail field in its profile pages, many LIONs provide their e-mail address somewhere in their summary or biography sections, making it easy for strangers viewing their public profile to send them invitations to connect. While the LIONs don't require their members to do so, they'll accept almost all invitations.

Today, several members of LION, including Mayaud, Evans and Burda, can be tracked on toplinked.com, a site that lists the top 50 most connected people on LinkedIn.