Linkedin Blog

[Editors Note: This is the start of a biweekly series of tips & tricks for collaborating more effectively with other professionals through LinkedIn groups.]

Millions of our members join their first groups to associate themselves with a university, company alumni group, trade organization, or professional interest. (Or Red Sox Nation.) Having the logos of these groups on your profile adds depth and color to your professional identity on the Web. But the logo is only the start of the story.

From the day we launched, LinkedIn has been about helping professionals build and maintain trusted relationships online. Over the past six years, we’ve seen millions of professionals gravitate towards this concept and members are signing up for LinkedIn in unprecedented numbers.

Today over 37 million professionals on LinkedIn believe that bringing our real-world professional relationships online will help all of us work smarter. While the network grows rapidly, we want to make sure that we preserve the user experience – for every user – by maintaining the integrity of the site. Unfortunately, it has come to our attention that a very small number of users tarnish the experience for some members of our community.

Some of you may have noticed the change to how and when your inbox shows up on your homepage: it will only appear when you have unread messages – but your inbox and your read messages are always available from the left navigation bar on the homepage. So, when your Inbox is empty and doesn’t display on your LinkedIn homepage, click through to your Inbox to check out your read messages.

Clicking through to the main page of your Inbox also reveals a new tabbed structure: all messages are easily accessible from the Received, Sent and Archived tabs. At a glance you can now see all your messages and easily drill down by applying a filter, for example invitations.

[Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of contributing guest author posts from LinkedIn users. Today you hear from CEO of Moo.com, Richard Moross, who outlines ways for professionals to stand out from the crowd with your business cards. Did you know: you could create a set of Moo business cards by pulling in information from your LinkedIn profile?]

I started moo.com because of an obsession with great design, a love of the web and a desire to combine both in a business which would help people unleash their creativity, stand-out, connect and prosper.