Monday, February 25, 2008

New chinks in the chain at LinkedIn

The jury may still be out on this, but the LinkedIn home page as been completely redesigned.

It boasts a much better organized information architecture, particularly for navigating to inbox, profile, contacts, groups. Additionally it provides a nice and concise snapshot view of the user's profile with profile photo, # of contacts, and a summary of the number of views in a given week.

It is the middle of the page which gets a bit diluted for me. The Inbox most recent 5 messages I get; however, it is the box below which contains a summary of news feeds for a company that is at the bottom of my profile and really not pertinent or newsworthy right now, and there is no intuitive way to change this that I can find right now. I struggle with why I need it at all on my home page. It is followed by Network Updates, which has proven very useful and insightful and something I would value seeing higher in the hierarchy of information on my home page.

Finally in the right rail is a part-time house promo ad highlighting some of the other new features including LinkedIn tips, as well as the new LinkedIn mobile (http://m.LinkedIn.com).
More importantly, what follows is what I would have expected for the center body of content, which is an AJAX enabled set of modules/widgets that I can move around, reorder, add and subtract to this rail. Perhaps as this whole page is noted as being beta capability that maybe the flexibility of the rest of the page is coming....bada-boom, bada-bing!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I haven't tried linked in yet, however, I just wanted to issue an official invite to Blogging While Brown, the first international conference for Black bloggers. It is an opportunity for us to move past a single panel at SXSW, Blogher, or Yearly Kos. You can learn more at www.bloggingwhilebrown.com and the blog, BloggingWhileBrown.blogspot.com You might consider putting together a panel for the BWB conference as well. It is in Atlanta, GA July 25-27, 2008. Hope to see you there.