Feature enhancements from Network Updates to LinkedIn News
This past week saw the introduction of a slew of feature enhancements that I’d like to cover briefly. In addition, stay tuned to news on a few of our partnerships and “LinkedIn News” feature updates, both of which you’ll hear more about in the coming weeks. Here are the updates on the following couple of features:
1. Network Updates
a. Expanded Connection Updates: Our connection updates will now tell you who your connections just connected to. No more “Chris Richman has 2 new connections”… You’ll actually see the names of the connections.
b. Mini-profile with actions: Those mini-profile popups you see on the site will now include several actions you can take on the profile such as sending a message. This will help create a communication loop so members can respond to profile updates, status messages, etc. It’s built to take into account context, so we can show different actions for non-connections (invite, inmail, etc), and different actions depending on where you are on the site. Read more about it from Dhananjay’s post.
2. LinkedIn News:
The news team updated your news freshness, which is always good. News articles for company, competitors, and industry are now sorted by date. This should improve the freshness of articles that appear in those three sections.
Next week, we’ve a video demo as well as an update on our API partnerships! Have a great weekend!
And, feel free to either leave a comment or feedback at the bottom of this post. Thanks!
trackback
http://blog.linkedin.com/2008/03/15/feature-enhance/trackback/
JB Perrin March 17th, 2008
Hello,
Do you believe it could be possible to share other news articles than the ones already on the list? I mean, for instance, I have been in economic and market intelligence for quite some time and I read articles on a daily basis to stay tuned to what is important for my company. It would be cool to be able to share these with colleagues (we are all on LinkedIn) and even other contacts. I don’t have the impression that this is currently possible.
Best regards,
JB
Allison March 17th, 2008
Really like the new look/nav but REALLY miss the “who has viewed my profile feature.
Matthew Ringman March 18th, 2008
How do I remove the news function? It is now popping up with company news for a company I never have worked for.
It could be a great feature but when it is giving me articles for programming and I do not know how to program it is essentially worthless
Claus Rasmussen March 18th, 2008
The update with the full name of new connection in my network is great – so much easier than before to quickly scan across them and see if any names are recognized!
The company news beta is a bit annoying though – maybe because my danish company shares initials with an american company from a completely different industry, which means my “company news” is completely irrelevant to me. If I could turn off that module from my linkedin portal page, that would be fine. Alternatively you could allow the users to control what news are shown.
Regards,
Claus
Susie March 18th, 2008
I’m curious how useful this feature of seeing friend updates is or if it was driven to be on par with another certain site. For example LinkedIn would build on its strengths by providing 2 unique features:
1) the ability for me to introduce 2 people proactively and suggest they could help each other.
2) the ability for me to email all my contacts or post a message to my contacts other than a “status” message.
In other words, I hope LinkedIn innovates based on its own purpose and customer needs and not simply to try to attract people from using other sites that seem to think moment by moment status is what everyone wants.
Thanks.
Mario Sundar March 18th, 2008
@jb,
That’s not feasible at the moment, although I’d urge you to stay tuned for updates on the News product.
@matthew and @claus,
The News team is working on improve your user experience as I blog, and we understand your frustrations. Kindly bear with us and we’ll be updating the blog with more news on LinkedIn News this week.
Thanks for your patience, guys.
@susie,
Quick thought: you should be able to get what you’ve been looking for through one-to-one messaging. Have you checked it out? Status is definitely the easiest way to let your professional network know “what’s up” in your world.
Thanks for the feedback. Keep em’ coming!
Nathan Matthews March 19th, 2008
I’d really like to see an answer to Allison’s question. In fact, because everyone else’s questions were answered, it appears as if her question was deliberately ignored. I’ve noticed other blog posts where responses containing questions about the “Who’s Viewed My Profile” information disappearing have gone unanswered as well. Could be coincidence I suppose but could someone please just answer the question?
Dave Senor March 20th, 2008
Hi:
I was just wondering, if you update your public profile and your previous profile was indexed on Google, will the updated profile have to re-index?
My profile has disappeared from ranking since I updated it.
Let me know
Mark March 20th, 2008
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE get rid of the news function, or at least give me a way to turn it off. It’s messing up my screen with things I really don’t want. It is about some company I’ve never heard about. This week it returned after vanishing, blissfully, for a week or so; prior to that it was about a different company I’ve never heard about.
Just give me a way to disable it, please.
Chris Richman March 21st, 2008
Nathan — Who’s Viewed My Profile is still a beta product, so it comes and goes somewhat as we continue to tweak it.
Dave — I’m not positive, but I think you do have to wait for Google to re-index. Should happen within a week or two.
Mark — I’m not the Product Manager for News, but I’ll pass your comments along to her. I know they’re working on more customization and I suspect they’ll provide a way to hide it.
Chris
Fernando Fernandez April 17th, 2008
You should think about some features around geo-location of the users. For example, registering business trips could tell us who, from our network, we could meet in that trip. Then, If a person goes for some event, like Cebit, she would know who would also be there…
Also it would be nice to see my network spread on a google map. But first you would have to ask everybody to put in their GPS coordinates.
John Brady April 23rd, 2008
Are you ever going to build functionality for the Groups? I moderate one and there is nothing that I can do for them.
I’d like to see the following:
Private billboard that can be broken down into categories where members can post announcements, jobs or messages to the community.
The ability to sign up for notifications of new postings
David Patterson May 1st, 2008
The Who’s Viewed My Profile is always there (for me at least) after I visit basically any page other than the home page. When I first enter LinkedIn it is never there.
So try clicking on Answers or people, then Home…
Good luck!
Girish June 2nd, 2008
Was trying to find the right place to post my suggestion.
Linkedin badly needs a feature, where i can limit access for individual connections of mind. Eg. I dont want all my connections to be able to access my list of connnections (I only want some of them to be able to acccess it).
Can you develop something like facebook’s limited profile, where i can choose the users who can access my full list of connections and those who can’t. Currently is all or nothing, which is not very useful.
Thanks.
Frank Vagi July 10th, 2008
I would love a feature where one could limit the network connection updates to a subset of his /her connections. (Example: from the 2,000 connections I have, I would like to select 300 or so to get daily network connection updates from). Is something like this available currently or perhaps in the works?