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.
I like the new “Recent Readers” widget MyBlogLog released. The glossy design shaped as an iPhone, the simple configuration process (less is more) and the ‘flyouts’ – those little nuggest of information about a reader that appear when you point to a member, very much like Snap Shots.
Check out the new widget on the right sidebar of this blog.
Google OpenSocial vs. Facebook F8 – Doesn’t it look, feel and smell like Isreali, or actually any country’s, politics?
Coalitions are being formed. PR spins are created trying to set the public opinion. The one you voted for yesterday will most likely disappoint you tomorrow. And no one asks the people (users) what really bothers them.
I wonder whether political/strategic advisors were also hired to run those campaigns.
photo credit: mattyfacex
Myspace officially released their desktop IM. The question is does the world really need another major IM network, especially if it takes a walled garden approach?
“Fox estimates that more than 17 million users have installed the service”. Is there a reason they did not report the number of active users? Is it related to the fact that the product is a generation behind the competition and supports only text conversations, without the ability to do video/audio calls or file sharing?
Forget everything you know about digital photography because here comes Microsoft Photosynth.
Jason sent me this video and it blew me away. It was presented earlier this year at the TED conference and it’s one of the most impressive visualization technologies that I have seen for a long time.
One of the features I liked most is the ability to see where pictures where taken and seamlessly change the point of view to be as you were standing where the photographer was. Then seamlessly tilt, zoom in or out or continue to change point of views. The speed this is done is extraordinary considering it can run on a browser installed on a standard PC.
It’s a great example of how social data from people’s collective visual memory (photos) can be linked together to make something that is greater than the sum of its part.
I think that after you will play with it you will find it even more impressive than the video.
I was kind of surprised to see this in the middle of a working day (to be more accurate 6:05PM Pacific).
I am glad I am not a sales guy who needs another sale to reach his Q2 goals…it would be kind of hard to find now the name of a potential client.
Update: It is taking a little longer than expected.
Technorati Tags: LinkedIn
Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital) posted a great one on the different approaches Myspace and Facebook have related to Widgets and their role in the new social economy.
Too bad both environments still disallow a great utility such as Snap Shots to be added to users pages.
Following the improvement made to the My Connection page, LinkedIn came out with two new features:
- Premium Featured Members
- Who’s Viewed My Profile (full story here)
Both features have been around for a long time on Online Dating sites and serve as baits for non-paying members to buy premium memberships. I think this is a smart move that will probably have strong impact on the number of new premium members.
Now all LinkedIn has to do is add the ability to upload photos and potentially an Instant Message and become the elite online dating site for professionals.
LinkedIn also came out recently with better ways to find people who are not necessarily in your connection list. On the search results page, just above the list of names, a new section was added with suggested searches:
- Current employees of a company
- Execs at a company will list all Partners, Chiefs, VPs, and Directors in a company. I am sure that personal financial advisers & life insurance agents would love this new tool.
- “Similar Searches” is very interesting. I am still not clear on the relevance algo and how they come up with those suggestions (search routes of the masses?), but the results can certainly help someone who is interested in finding leads into companies who operate in the same category/industry.
As my LinkedIn network have grown I found it more and more difficult to search for a particular contact. The browse functionality was very limited and was implemented using first letters of groups of names that were buried at the bottom of the page. This made it very difficult to quickly “browse” the list and I hardly did that. Instead I used the generic Search box (by name and company) in order to find a specific contact.
Today I discovered that LinkedIn completely redid the “My Connection” page and improved the usability of the browse functionality significantly.
The new features include:
- A scroll bar – it’s just amazing how a basic & trivial design/interaction element can improve usability and ‘speed to satisfaction’ so dramatically
- Rolodex style tabs with first letters to quickly jump to a particular location within the list
- Advanced filtering options ( Ajax based) such as “by location”, “by industry”, and the very cool “show only contacts with new connections”
I find this to be a major improvement following the revamp of the internal introductions system and very well done.
