Talking Out Loud with ASB

What I Need From LinkedIn

As I wrote way back in May 2007 concerning LinkedIn, it is an awesome tool that greatly facilitates Professional Networking.  The LinkedIn Answers feature, for instance, is a very nice way to find people who you might be interested in connecting with, either because they helped you or because you could provide some assistance for them.

Notwithstanding the usefulness I derive from LinkedIn, there are some areas that I would love to see improvement.  And I'm certainly not the only one: At least 2 or 3 times a month, I see questions in the Answers area that solicit opinions about functionality that the folks at LinkedIn should be providing.

My shortlist is as follows:

• Categorization of Contacts
  I have managed to accumulate a fair number of contacts at this point, and even though there are many ways that they could be connected to me (military, school, work, church, online, business, common interest, etc), I have no way of capturing this data within the system itself.  Some sort of tagging functionality would be extremely useful here.
   
• Tiered Contacts
  In real life, our contacts and associates are not all on the same level.  We have trusted and close partners and friends, and more distant associates and acquaintances. LinkedIn should acknowledge this and allow us to generate tiered levels of contacts with permissions and entitlements on a per-tier basis.  Perhaps I want my 1st tier contacts to be able to see my full list of contacts, but not everyone else.  Perhaps I will accept unsolicited requests from the first two tiers, but not others.  We should have that option for the technology to mimic how we manage our relationships in actuality.
   
• Remembering your Preferences
  Why can't the system store the fact that I like to view LinkedIn Answers sorted by date? 
  When I search for colleagues, I commonly set certain filtering criteria, and I have to set it each and every time I perform a search.  Why?
  There's no reason why user preferences can't be stored and remembered for different site modules or sections on a per user basis.  There are a great many bits of information already stored, but it is far from complete.
   
• Consistency of Site Configuration Options
  Is there any reason why I can't sort contacts by when I connected to them?
  Why are the options for various site settings strewn all across the website?
   
• Please Fix the Inbox
  The Inbox is not really an Inbox because you can't delete anything from there.  Archiving should not be the only option.  How about delete?  How about FIND?
   
• Bulk Update Options
  Trying to go through an old list of invitations that were sent out, and dealing with the expires is positively tedious.  Everything you do pops you back to location that requires that you click a half-dozen times to continue what you were doing. 
  Why can't I select a group of names/contacts and operate on them at once?
  Why is there no "Back" or "Next" button so you can continue with the other contacts once you work on the first one?
   
• Some UI Changes
  -- More control over which jobs/roles are displayed and in which order. Perhaps a category for volunteer or non-employment activities
  -- An alias function for employer names so that you can display the company name as you choose, but also put a list of other names that would represent the same company (e.g. Sun, Sun Microsystems). This would aid in searches and in the "other colleagues" functionality.
  -- Easier traversing of the Answers content without scrolling through each page in its entirety to get to the next page.

These are my major concerns with LinkedIn, even though I really like the existing functionality.  I've looked at a couple of the other business networking players, and haven't seen any reason to switch -- yet.  And as many times as I've seen these types of requests, I'm somewhat surprised that I haven't seen a whole lot of feedback or acknowledgement from LinkedIn staff or management on these types of suggestions.  I hope that they are paying attention, or someone else will come around and put together the complete business social networking site, and LinkedIn will find themselves on the has-been list, and that would be a shame.