Just Business?

A few days back, LinkedIn added a feature that I’d asked for the last time I wrote about the service – the ability to add RSS feeds to groups. Depending on the functionality enabled by your group manager in any group, you could add a site/feed that fits the group profile and all the members could benefit. From the comments on the page, there seem to be a few implementation issues. Vijay, who manages the Digital Marketing India group on LinkedIn (the one I most actively participate in) has added a few feeds, but we’re yet to play with it much 🙂

He also pointed me to this interview with Allen Blue, a LinkedIn co-founder. Allen mentions in the interview that ‘groups’ is the most exciting thing they’re working on now, though they seem to be doing things to limit the functionality of the groups. He also says that (among others) he’s impressed with Ning and Facebook. Will come back to that in a bit.

I am wondering if this feeds functionality will also be made available to company webpages. For now the pages are pretty impressive, with a whole lot of data being provided. But there are possibilities – like allowing page managers to create an RSS feed of news about the company, which any user could subscribe to and be updated. (a Google alert approach). They could also allow multimedia uploads (haven’t seen any yet) and more interactivity. In short, become the second interface of the company, right after their corporate site – what brands are doing with Facebook fan pages, only on LinkedIn it will be more of a serious interaction.

Ning has been making waves and I have been seeing a lot of people utilising it to make networks. As of Sep 08, it had 2955000 users and a YOY growth rate of 251% (LinkedIn was right behind at 193%) (via StartUp meme) But (at least) for now, I don’t see it operating in the same space as LinkedIn, since Ning is more on building groups around common interests, and that’s only one of the things LinkedIn does.

The real action will happen when Xing, the European business network will start deriving some synergy from its recent acquisition – SocialMedian. Towards the second half of 2008, Xing had 7 million users as against LinkedIn’s 12 million, and was making profits. Though I’ve not come across a lot of Xing users in India, even LinkedIn is not an ancient phenomenon here. So there’s definitely time to catch up. Xing has most of the functionality that LinkedIn has, but more importantly has a brilliant resource in Social Median, and its implementation of Facebook Connect. During its acquisition, the then CEO had said that Social Median, with its news gathering (from 19000 sources) and custom filtering was a perfect fit for Xing. I couldn’t agree more. The value it could add to the individual and the groups he/she is part of is tremendous. This is an area that LinkedIn has not fully tapped.

Meanwhile, the service that I thought might be a good buy for LinkedIn – Yammer, recently announced that Twitter updates can now be imported into Yammer. When I had written about Yammer first, I had mentioned a ‘bridge’ between Yammer and Twitter. This move has solved part of it, for me the more important part is the (filtered) Yammer updates going into Twitter, and come to think of it, LinkedIn. But of course, this is connected a lot with an organisation’s levels of transparency.

And if all this wasn’t enough, we now have a new player – Blellow. TC called it a Yammer meets LinkedIn meets Twitter entity. Blellow describes itself as a productivity microblog, that  allows users to collaborate, find jobs and solve problems via a Twitter like interface with ‘followers’ and ‘following’, private messaging, @ replies, (the question here is ‘What are you working on?’) Where it differs from Twitter is that updates can go upto 300 characters, users are organised into groups, and there are threaded discussions. One can create a profile, form groups based on projects or interests, ask questions in groups and give ‘kudos’ for answers that help (a rating mechanism), post jobs (for a price), plan meetups..  From the looks of it, its a great niche package for freelancers and people looking for quick help in specific fields, maybe LinkedIn could acquire and scale up? 🙂

With the personal-professional lines blurring, the Xing-SocialMedian-Facebook Connect association is something LinkedIn should be looking closely at. It either has to get an equally strong partner or develop features and data portability by itself, and perhaps acquire services that complement its own services.

until next time, mind your business 😀