Yovav (Jay) Meydad's Personal Blog

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.

Macbook Air is not the only creative thing Apple came out with this week.

Today Apple started running a new campaign for Leopard. I saw it on the home page of the New York Times. In this 30 seconds ad (which you will want to watch it again and again – trust me), the PC guy climbs the ladder and breaks out from the Half Page Ad unit to the Leaderboard, hangs the "NOT" sign while talking with Mac and then goes down the ladder. The synchronization between the two ad units is perfect and the experience is fun and engaging.

Can you imagine that? There are web products that are dying to get to the level of user engagement this ad has. Harry up and watch it yourself on NYTimes.com