[David Strom's Web Informant] 24 November 2009: How to make LinkedIn even better

[David Strom]

David Strom's Web Informant, 24 November 2009: How to make LinkedIn even better

LinkedIn has been busy in the past week, sprucing up their default
members' home page, linking with Twitter, and putting together a very
belated effort at opening their service to programmers.

I like LinkedIn. I am spending more of my time using it to promote
myself, to connect to people that I know, and to build up value for my
community and myself. With the help of the local chamber of commerce,
I now manage a group called the St. Louis Job Angels, where we have
listed more than 80 different jobs over the past couple of months and
more than 500 job seekers and recruiters have signed up to share tips
and support each other's efforts. So as a long-time frequent user, I
offer some advice of where they should be going in 2010 – not that
anyone will listen to my humble suggestions.

First off, they need to be more open. The add-on applications were a
good first step (you can link up to your Wordpress and TypePad blog
entries, publish your slide decks via Slideshare, and others). And the
developer network (developer.linkedin.com) is a good second step, but
I want more. I would like to use my LinkedIn connections as my main
contact manager, but until I can gain more control over this
information it isn't as useful as it could be. Why do I need to
publish these Web Informant newsletters to a separate email listserv
that I have to maintain with your current email addresses?  Probably
most of you subscribers also take the time and energy to maintain your
current email address in LinkedIn, so why duplicate that effort? Well,
because it is too hard to still setup groups and email selected
contacts inside of LinkedIn.

Second, I want to be able to freely export my connections without
having to resort to a third-party service. Right now, OpenXchange
(ox.io) is the only way that I can extract my contacts. Yes, I can
synch up my address books on any number of services (one that I have
mentioned in the past is Glide, glidedigital.com) -- but these are
strictly a one-way operation, pouring data into LinkedIn. I don't like
using services that I can't extract my data easily.

Third, scrap InMail. We don't need another communication substitute
for email or IM. Ditto for the LinkedIn toolbars for Outlook and the
Web. My browser window is small enough without any more clutter.

Fourth, give me better and more discrete publishing tools for my
groups, similar to the way the free Yahoo or Google Groups services
operate. Right now, I can send messages to everyone, but only as the
group manager. My group can't easily communicate amongst themselves,
without my intervention.  Subgroups are a nightmare to deal with.
There is no easy way to remind people that I have invited to the group
(but haven't accepted the invite). Can I get a URL that points
directly to my group? Not easily. And so on. Any quick look at what
Yahoo has been doing since they bought eGroups nearly ten years ago
would show the way towards a truly useful service.

None of these suggestions would be difficult, or even time consuming
to implement. And I am sure that there are plenty of other things that
they have on their radar. Feel free to share your own on my
strominator.com blog too.