LinkedIn has quietly been releasing a number of very useful features over the past few months, and I thought I would point them out as I find them really useful:
Public profile: you can now expose elements of your LinkedIn profile - which is only feasible to people in your network - to all users. Your Public profile URL is http://linkedin.com/in/ACCOUNT_NAME (here is mine). And LinkedIn makes badges available too.- You can now list your blogs and web sites in said profile.
- A feature I have been asking for 2+ years: you can now see the people who have recently joined LinkedIn in your rollodex - allowing you to decide who to invite more efficiently.
- For users of the Outlook toolbar, the Dashboard functionality gives you a list of people you could add to your address book (because you exchanged an email with them), people who are already on LinkedIn you could connect to, and most interestingly people in your rollodex whose contacts have changed.
- In the same toolbar Grab allows you to select someone signature block, and automatically extract signature fields to easily create a new address book record. As this is something that I do multiple times a day, this is proving quite useful - even if results are not 100% perfect.
Finally, and this is a fantastic achievement, LinkedIn is now profitable as announced by CEO (and good friend) Reid Hoffman in the second edition of TalkCrunch: Social Networks 3.0.
Disclaimer: I have no economic interest in LinkedIn.
Tags: linkedin
Congrats to Reid and the team on adding these useful features. Although I'm feeling a little bit of deja vu...
http://www.socialcustomer.com/2006/04/haystack_update.html
;-)
Posted by: Christopher Carfi | May 01, 2006 at 09:41 PM
Thanks for the link to the linked in buttons - I'd been looking for the profile buttons after I'd seen them another blog.
Posted by: Paul Browne | May 02, 2006 at 05:51 AM
Good for Reid and crew. Of course, I've been lobbying them to add blog listings for two years now, but I can understand the need to focus on getting profitable.
But here's a question? Why can't I access a list of all blogs for all members of my network?
Furthermore, why can't I access an OPML file of that list?
Posted by: Chris Yeh | May 10, 2006 at 05:24 PM