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 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
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.
