LinkedIn seems to be releasing a lot of new products lately. Yesterday they released their iPhone version. Today, I noticed a new feature – Company News (still in beta) are displayed at the top of the member’s dashboard. This feature, built similar to Facebook’s news feed, presents the recent news about the companies I have worked at (and their competitors/industry) based on my LinkedIn profile.
To make this feature useful and intriguing enough to interact with, I think that the sorting algorithm needs to get improved. Don’t just sort the stories by their popularity (strong bias toward large companies such as AOL in my case) or release date but factor in the employment dates and penalize stories from/about companies I worked at long ago. After all, I care very little about a place I worked at 5 years ago but I am very interested to learn what is written about my current company or the one I recently left.
I have the feeling that for many start-up employees who used to work at big companies this is going to be a common issue, which could affect the user engagement and adoption of the “Company News” feature . I am curious to see how this feature is going to evolve over time and I hope to see some end user’s controls being added to help fine tune the experience.
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The design and user experience seem to be on point, and at the very least they’re looking a little more contemporary. They seem to be making some good progress making network activity a priority as a way to increase interaction between users. The one complaint I have so far is with the main navigation. Visually the turquoise horizontal line feels like an old-school frame. It’s distracting. Also, the downplay of the navigation Flickr-style buries some of the features with the result being that the site feels very narrow. This might be a good thing if they feel that the primary interactions are going to come from areas within the body content, but I wonder what it will be like for new members or people with very few connections in their network. The folks who can potentially benefit the most from a site like Linkedin are the ones just starting out on their career path. I also feel like search has lost it’s prominence, but I’m going to have to sign back in to verify my first impression.
I went back to verify my statement about search and got their maintenance page. Either they deployed and have some quick bug fixes coming at the last minute on a Friday or they’re adding some more features.