Refined Network Updates, Groups and new Notes!

I'm back! (check out my recent feature post here) and this time it's to announce a bunch of upcoming feature updates in categories as diverse as Network Updates to Messaging. Before we get into the nitty gritty of each of the four feature refinements, here's an overview that Ruslan and I provided Mario, our community guy, yesterday:

Let's start with the new feature you haven't seen before.

1. Personal Notes | One-to-one messaging

How many times have you thought, it'd be nice to message your connections on LinkedIn directly without having to open up your email client. Well, now that's exactly what you'll be able to do. For e.g. let's assume you're browsing the profile of a connection of yours that you'd like to message.

Notice the "Send a message" button. By clicking that you'll notice a popup message box that allows you to directly message Molly.

Alternatively, you'll also be able to compose messages directly from the Inbox as well.

2. Network Updates | Chronological arrangement

Starting today, you'll also notice that your network updates are arranged chronologically, to make it easier for you to understand what it is that your peers and colleagues are up to within your professional universe. If you'd like to explore the Updates further, go through "See more Network Updates" link to a page with the updates archived on a weekly basis.

3. Yahoo! Web Mail Importer (In addition to Gmail and AOL)

One of the important ways to start leveraging the benefits of a social network is to upload your email contacts into LinkedIn. Thus far, we've been providing web mail import of Gmail and AOL and now you can also upload your Yahoo! Mail contacts with LinkedIn. Also, for all you Outlook fans, we've got our LinkedIn Outlook toolbar, which you can download here.

4. Groups

You may have read of the recent upgrades to LinkedIn Groups that Benjamin Guthrie outlined in an earlier post here. In this release, Ben and team just made joining a group on LinkedIn a little bit easier. Whenever you see a group logo on a person’s profile, you are now able to request to join the group by clicking on the logo. Your request to join will then go into a queue for the manager of the group to approve or decline.

Create your group today!

Please let us know what you think of the above features and provide us any feedback by leaving a comment on the blog.