Improved LinkedIn User Interface
Tuesday, July 18th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
The LinkedIn social networking service recently improved its user interface, following a major overhaul released in March and described in this past article. Among other things, the new user interface adds a hierarchical Inbox, and improves the way profile updates are presented.
The hierarchical Inbox is a much welcomed addition for active networkers that are dealing with more than ten requests a day. It organizes requests within categories such as Introductions, Invitations, and Jobs, and makes it a lot easier to process the ones that are time-sensitive (introductions).
Regarding user profiles, LinkedIn now highlights recent changes on the page, and aggregates notifications into a single weekly email, instead of sending one separate email for each updated profile. This in turn reduces one’s workload when trying to keep up with a fairly large network, which LinkedIn defines as one having more than 500 connections.
Overall, I like the changes that have been introduced, even though they remain quite cosmetic. A couple of much-needed and often-requested features remain to be implemented though. One would be to add user IDs into CSV contact exports in order to facilitate reconciliation with an external contact database. Another would be to syndicate the content of user profiles in a format that would make it usable for publishing, as described in this post.
Among all the companies I interact with, LinkedIn has not been the most supportive with respect to feature requests, to say the least. Nevertheless, I keep the faith and must hope that they’ll finally listen. The service they offer is too good to be ignored, and there is nothing like it on the Internet today.
Entry filed under: Social Networking
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We do listen, but different users ask for different things. The new inbox helps power users, but it also lays the foundation for facilitating more communication between members (especially those who are connections).
Since this may overwhelm those who have accepted connections from people they don’t know or care about, one of our next features is to allow members to break connections, so that people can right-size their direct networks to just the people they can and are willing to help (and who can and are willing to help them).
Konstantin,
In this case, please add LinkedIn IDs to the CSV contact export file, for reconciliation will become even more difficult when connections get broken without notification. Please…
I did an interview with LinkedIn, and was surprised to learn that they went to see my boss to tell him I was looking around for another job. I thought that was very borderline and wanted to share that. Given what their business is, one could expect a minimum of ethic.
Lucho,
That’s a pretty major accusation… I’ll let the LinkedIn guys comment.
I spoke with the hiring manager and he (a) disclosed to “Lucho” that he is friends with his current boss, (b) asked if it would be OK to ask his friend about him and (c) did not speak with his friend about Lucho when Lucho asked that he wouldn’t.
Konstantin,
Thanks for the clarification. Much appreciated.
[…] LinkedIn: This one defined the space for professional networking early on, then was copied and improved upon by OpenBC, later renamed Xing. It grew to a high-quality network rich of 9 million users, and should cross the bar of 10 million sometime in Q1 or early Q2 this year. Problem is, it’s not very sticky, in the sense that it does not provide any incentive for users to login on a regular basis, like they would with Facebook or MySpace, unless you happen to be a recruiter. My personal belief is that LinkedIn is sitting on a phenomenal untapped potential, which will be realized only when it adds group management features similar to what Xing has been developing all along. I just have no idea when this will happen though. In the meantime, you cannot really use LinkedIn to manage your contacts on its own, for it does not allow you to add information to contacts directly. Instead, it’s a very good companion to Microsoft Outlook as a way to create new connections, or lookup the last working email address for a contact who recently switched jobs. If you’re not using Microsoft Outlook, synchronization with your contact management application has to be done manually, which is a royal pain. I have been asking LinkedIn Corporation to add the LinkedIn unique ID to their standard CSV export about a gazillion times over the past two years, but have failed miserably so far. Note to Reid: please… […]
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