That’s the position I have to believe is running the show these days.
I mean – what else could explain all of the recent events?
Answers – closed down.
RSS – crippled and closing.
Sending messages to your contacts through tags/labels – no longer functioning.
Let’s consider it…
Where the name came form
Reader Jake was commenting about the accelerating decline of useful features on the site when the title above came to me – it is almost as if there’s somebody with that title making all the decisions!
Have you seen really useful things added during this time?
Questions
It was always an interesting little niche of LinkedIn – a bit of a free-for-all among the askers of questions and the answerers of them.
Yes, you could just ask a question straight up and hope to get an answer.
Or you could use the Jeopardy concept and construct your announcement as a question. Consider: “I’m holding a seminar on the Nth of March, and want to attract the people most likely to benefit from Managed IT Services. Do you know what sorts of topics I should cover to address the most significant concerns?”
Answers
And you could display your knowledge with helpful answers.
And yes – if you happened to answer 462 questions in one week, you had your name on the top of a leaderboard.
(I do wonder what all those people do with their time now though…)
RSS
RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is a great little thing.
You can watch for threads of a topic and click into the ones that attract your attention.
It was an easy way to bring content to a group.
But of course, when people clicked on the content, they went to some other site for the actual article…
(I’d guess that it was a leader in a “why do people leave the site” investigation…)
Sending messages
So an interesting and sad thing happened to me today – I found a very topical bit of humor on kxcd.com, and wanted to share it with people that worked with me at one particular point in my life – they would definitely get the joke.
I knew I had tagged most of my LinkedIn connections and could find them fairly easily – and did. (Within connections, you can add “tags” or labels to sort people into groupings) And the page even adds a handy “send message” button after you select at least one connection.
Of course when you click on the send message button, you get to a screen to send a message – but none of the recipients you selected on the previous page appear. You must use your entire LinkedIn connection list and scroll through and select them one at a time – the handy tags are not available as a sorting mechanism…
Sad.
I’m sure it was deemed much too useful to actually sort and efficiently message people on the LinkedIn site. The Remover of Useful Things stepped in…
I’ll find something again
It’s too bad that the people that enjoyed making nifty new and useful things have been overruled. I expect they’re having as much of a difficult time continuing to go to work – and I expect recruiters are having a field day. (We’re unlikely to ever know how real that thought is, but it’s interesting to wonder…)
In any case, here’s to the next fun and useful thing that comes along.
To your continued success,
steve
—
Steven Tylock
http://www.linkedinpersonaltrainer.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevetylock
Steve
Yup – Readers list is gone too. I used it a lot to find useful literature.
Martin
Good thing I never moved forward with a LinkedIn app of my own – I’d be out of business at about this point…
steve
Funny, I had added Jobs Discussions via RSS Feeds. Now that is buried of course in last few months due to the paid feature. But with removing RSS entirely. I will no longer be able to give my group these positions as the effort to add discussions will waste loads of time I don’t have – to add Jobs too, I just cannot do any longer.
My worry. What about the day when they want to take Groups away from “owners”. That will be a big problem.
This site is fabulously expensive. I pay over $1000 annually to use it. Yet features, VERY useful ones, keep leaving every few months. It’s SOoooo frustrating. And complaints go nowhere.
Thanks for all you do Steve, you are one of the few people on the net making sense when LinkedIn seems to be making less and less or better yet, only for short-term profits. Keep up the good work! – Jake
Hmmm… There’s a lot that happens through a group owner – I don’t think they can take that away – but they could make group ownership unrewarding…
steve
Have you noticed all the changes to LinkedIn and the groups? They layout looks terrible. You can’t easily see Manager’s Choice posts any longer. The titles to posts look amateur, now all the names of the posters come with their titles ahead of the discussion which is confusing.
And I received angry emails from members that they were getting individual emails to new discussions, and they left the group! I went and checked and my own personal settings were changed to receiving 1 email per new discussion too – which of course it was not set to for years.
LinkedIn is hell bent on destroying their own creation. So many bad updates every single time.
Jake,
It’s a sad situation, but probably nothing we can do about it…
steve