Tag: LinkedIn

  • Weekly Top 5

    [scribd id=51588941 key=key-19m03e2zvo6xcn09ckzo mode=list]

  • #In Business

    In spite of being the gold standard in business networking, I’ve always felt that LinkedIn has been a bit slow in adapting to the needs of its audience. Quite some time back, I’d written about the ‘news’ and ‘groups’ features, and had asked for an RSS feature for groups. That feature was incorporated earlier this year, but I thought there were several other possibilities which could’ve been incorporated, specifically in company web pages – multimedia support, aggregation etc. My benchmark of comparison was Social Median (acquired by Xing, a competitor to LinkedIn). I’d also wondered if it’d make sense for LinkedIn to perhaps acquire or at least have an association with Yammer.

    Just when I was ready to give up on LinkedIn’s possibilities (completely agreed with this), they seem to have caught a new wind. First came the redesign, with significantly better navigation, a cleaner look and lesser scrolling!! And then came the sync that everyone had been waiting for. Twitter was Linked #in (or#li) with an option to selectively share tweets on LinkedIn. Good timing, I’d say, judging by a few studies. A Palo Alto Networks study stated that enterprise usage of twitter was up by 250% in 6 months. (FB at 192%) Another report (can be classified as dipstick from the number of responses) , by the 2.0 Adoption council, seemed to indicate that social computing was making its presence felt in the enterprise.

    Most importantly, LinkedIn finally opened up its platform to developers. Bring on the apps!! (no, not Link farm ville 😐 ) RWW has a good post on the good and bad news and a few possibilities. Tweetdeck, Posterous, Ribbit, JobDASH, Box.net, all have integrations happening. The wishlists have started too. As RWW mentions, a ‘people you might know from other networks’ and filtered status updates would be great. Sandeep Gautam has a ‘Follow Friday’ like mechanism and @mentions in status updates in his list.

    On that note, I wonder whether the sync would mean that the twitter system of hashtags would become popular on LinkedIn, and a status search would find a place among the current crop of searches available on LinkedIn. An open platform would indicate that LinkedIn updates could appear on outside search. Also (like FB Connect) people would be able to interact with a site using their LinkedIn account, and the content could be taken to LinkedIn.

    A few twitter tools whose LinkedIn version I’d like to see –

    • Mr.Tweet (recommendation to connect) basis current network, interests etc
    • Alerts – not just recruiter, people and events that currently exist, but more options
    • Twitturly – to track the URLs that are being talked about
    • Trends (which might initially be a subset of Twitter trends?)
    • Twitter lists + Groups – It would require identification of Twitter list members on LinkedIn and then an option to add list members – create new groups/ add to existing groups

    The two places where I hope for a lot of action are groups and Company Pages. With an open platform, an integration of delicious and friendfeed can’t be ruled out. Company (and UGC 😀 ) videos and photos via YouTube and Flickr? And while we’re at it I’d like to have LinkedIn in the Google Reader ‘Send to’ (officially) and in future the option to choose a group/page with which a particular  link can be shared.

    With the integration of twitter and an open platform, LinkedIn has the content and context to provide better interaction between the various stakeholders of the enterprise – employees, vendors, business partners and even consumers. I see a lot of potential for LinkedIn to become a key player in the social business design (a Dachis Group concept) we keep talking about these days. Let’s hope to see more updates soon. 🙂

    until next time, business tweets 🙂

  • It starts..again..

    Facebook is on the march, though I have no clue about the destination. A few days back, I read about the ‘Search Inbox’ feature getting added, that’s after the overall search was revamped and the rumours of the “Everyone Button“. With photo sharing, a revamped mail box, status updates, videos, games, I guess I’ll have to correct the earlier statement and say that the ‘walled garden’ has offered enough evidence that it is making itself *the* destination.

    I remembered an article I read a couple of weeks back on how its this merging of activities on facebook that has given it a growth of 8.54% growth in the last month, as compared to Twitter’s sudden fall to a relatively dismal 1.47% growth rate. As Shefaly pointed out the last time I’d compared the two services, there’d still be an audience that consider the Twitter protocol more useful in spite of Facebook’s ‘charms’. A general comparison of the user figures would show that Facebook has the mass. Whether the Twitter audience is a good enough number, time will tell.

    The other interesting article I read was about the social network identity crisis. For one, this is not about us, the users, but the networks themselves. I’d written sometime back about LinkedIn’s attempts to be like Facebook, which thankfully didn’t develop much. This article compares LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and their overlap. Friendfeed is another unique character in the mix, and serves well as a great aggegator, though it does appear geeky as far as the average user of Facebook goes. Like I’ve said before, Friendfeed thinks up all the neat stuff, and Facebook makes them popular to the masses. As for LinkedIn, their ‘official’ networking positioning keeps them at a safe distance now.

    But yes, the battle, in different manifestations for several years now- as mailboxes, portals and so on, has been for the spot of destination site, or rather the starting point of the user experience on the web, the first site a user opens on his browser, the base. And that’s the reason i feel that the recent spate of Facebook’s initiatives, while they seem to be aimed at replicating the utility of Twitter, are actually targeted against Google, and specifically, Wave. The approach of both are actually from two opposite directions – Google, from Mail and Talk to the spectacular collaborating, sharing and weaving features of Wave, and Facebook from social networking to newsfeed, to chat and mailboxes. Wave is Open Source, Facebook is opening the stream to developers. It will be interesting to see whether there can only be one/couple/all survivor/s from Wave, Facebook and the simple appeal of Twitter.

    until next time, Wavebook 🙂

    Update: Excellent post on Facebook vs Google, (click it, dammit :p) and here too, and why Facebook has a chance.

  • What do you recommend?

    One feature that helps add weight (generally) to a LinkedIn Profile is ‘Recommendations’. I’m not getting into debates on how it’s used etc, that’s a subjective thing, but someone else acknowledging that the concerned person has certain skills does help. Facebook recommends friends, Twitter recommends users to follow. These are three layers – in LinkedIn its a human, in Facebook its an algorithm basis the user’s location, friends etc, and as for Twitter, well, Twitter just decides – no algorithms. But its ok, we recommend links to each other on Twitter. 🙂

    A few activities recently made me think of recommendations. Two from Google and one from Facebook. A TechCrunch article from a few days back states that Google Friend Connect now has a widget that can help publishers know (and display) which parts of their websites their visitors like best. So it helps both parties. I’m guessing it should also help Google figure out a little more data on who reads what where, and therefore some thing that can be used to improve Ad Sense’s effectiveness. 🙂

    One of Google’s services that uses a recommendation mechanism is Google Reader. Google has now added a feature on Reader that lets you know which of your friends are still worth following on Reader, basis your consumption of their shares. I wonder if they’ll utilise this data for new users – eg. if A and B are existing users and C joins the service, will Google use the A’s and B’s data to help C start off? I also think users should have the option of sharing their own trends data with each other, tools can be used to enhance utility – eg. if i know that 90% of my friends are following TC, then I might share less of TC items.

    Meanwhile, RWW thinks that Facebook has to be working on some recommendation technology. With those thumbs up and down signs on ads, I won’t be surprised if Facebook uses that on friends – ‘Manu liked this ad’ (so we’re serving this to you, since you’re his friend) and one more ‘rebellion’.

    Also, from RWW, a related topic, for a larger perspective – Linked Data. “Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year, evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself.” We are moving towards a web that’s increasingly inter connected.

    That made me think – we’ve reached a state where you can now login to Facebook with your GMail id (not vice versa yet), thanks to its working with OpenID. There are tools on existing social networks (and new services) for location based social networking. Made me think of the potential of a larger recommendation based web experience, that can then spill over on to real life. Recommendations are already being used, even in online commerce.

    But what it actually made me think is about a larger system where say, Facebook, the ad publisher and I will all share revenue if the friend does some positive action on the ad served to him, thanks to me. And of course, Google will then use this info to serve ads to me later, or utilise this on its own Friend Connect + iGoogle+ AdSense . 😉

    Virtually connected lifestreams and real money. The friends of friends of friends connection utilised upto a huge degree (with privacy controls) – its not a real social connection, only an algorithm that would calculate relevance basis the degree of separation and the history of activities. Recommendations of ideas, links, ads, people, jobs, music, books and any kind of products, services etc.. an algorithm boost to ‘serendipity’, if you will 🙂 It even works the other way, so  if you say, log in to a site to check out products, it immediately searches to see if there’s a recommendation it can push at you. Trust automatically plays a key role, and how well past recommendations have worked for you.

    Meanwhile, let’s hope that Google doesn’t make a social algorithm to top the one they’re working on now – to identify which of its employees are likely to quit. A recommendation feature that allows one employee to suggest another would be a Google killer. 😉

    until next time, ahem, some social advertising -I’d recommend watching this space – for a virtual interview 😉

  • 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 😀