MMLGF 9: Linkedin Groups Privacy and Visibility

In this long series of post about Linkedin Groups I’ve been writing in the last two or three months I talked about some interesting things like new features linkedin groups should add, exporting information, accessing linkedin groups from your home page and more and more… Although I talked too much, I haven’t said a word about Linkedin groups visibility and privacy.

 

Linkedin groups are on these days semi-public. why? Because you have to invited or ask for being added to any group if you want to be part of it. Maybe you find a group by word of mouth, by doing a search or by any way you want but…

 

… But what if we don’t want to own a semi-public group? What if we want or need some group to be really open or really private so nobody see it?

 

I thought three different kind of groups’ privacy will be just perfect for users.

• Public Groups: There are some groups just open to anyone, without the need to register. It looks like current Linkedin Answers where everybody can ask and answer.
• Semi public Groups: These groups will only let members participate in the groups where non-members must ask for subscription. This is the way Linkedin groups are being created these days that let users create groups for specific regions or businesses.
• Private Groups: That kind of group let companies and people start their own groups without appearing in any Linkedin groups’ directory. That option would let businessmen do/prepare and invite people to meetings online as well as be informed from many different sources or communicate with partners or clients in a silent way.

 

As Private groups are not listed and you just can be member of by invitation , maybe this kind of groups should not be free but let Linkedin or any business social network implementing this decide…

 

This is post #9 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series. Ideas for free 😉

Linkedin strategy for upcoming "not so open" platform

I’m back at blogging after two weeks approximately with some “possible” not good news for developers and people that are waiting Linkedin’s API.

Why? Well.. Reading Mashable.com I found an interesting post about a New York times’ article about Linkedin strategy for the upcoming API.

I guess all can be resumed to the next phrase:

“We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open A.P.I. letting people do whatever they want,” Mr. Nye said.

Mr. Nye is the chief executive of Linkedin, so he has the power to the decide the future of linkedin.

“So LinkedIn will have to approve any company that wants to tap into its system. Mr. Nye says he is looking for two kinds of applications. First, there are deals that enable LinkedIn members to tap into their connections in other places, for example, while using applications like Salesforce.com. Second, some applications will be allowed to add features to LinkedIn’s own site. Mr. Nye offered, as an example, a module connected to a trade show or conference that integrated travel planning and other features.”

On June 24th they mentioned they will open to developers… and they are just openning to some companies not to developers at all…

What can I say?… I have no words…

As a resume.. It looks like they are building a “not so open” platform.

MMLGF 8: Exporting your LinkedIn groups activity (Blogging?)

Everybody knows that LinkedIn provide us with some tools and also with a website where we can do direct marketing about ourselves and our needs, and also find people (doing marketing about themselves) that can be future clients, partners or providers.

 

In previous posts on this long series, I’d been writing ideas like:

• Benefits on showing your activity on your public profile
• Advantages of using small boxes with each group’s information on our LinkedIn home
• Benefits on including LinkedIn Groups’ activity on LinkedIn Search

Implementation of those ideas would add great value and would let you do direct marketing easily. But, what other thing would add more value to you and your direct marketing task? The answer is exporting as RSS Feed, Web Services, etc all your LinkedIn (groups) activity.

 

Exporting your LinkedIn groups’ activity (for example your questions, your answers, some specific search or just whatever you can imagine) would be definitely great.

 

Why this is great? Because you will have the chance to show what you do, what you think, what you are looking at, what you are looking for and what you ……. (Complete with the verb you want).

So what? You would use all that staff not only inside LinkedIn but also outside of it.

What are the benefits for users?

• If you export what you ask, then you can put those questions anywhere and, first, bring traffic and readers to LinkedIn. Second, promote your question anywhere probably getting more answers and, third, be aware of how important your questions are, how much readers your questions have by using some RSS Feed tools like feedburner.com.
• If you export your answers then in some way these spread answers you do can be taken as a group and share all together like if you were writing a blog. So, your answers are your blog… 🙂
• If you export some specific search, then you are building a feed with some kind of “what I’m reading”.
• If you export what you ……. (Completed before with the verb you wanted) then you can do what you want (do business, implement your website with “best answers”, etc.)

 

This is post #8 of the (M)aking the (M)ost of (L)inkedIn (G)roups (F)unctionality (MMLGF) Series.

Linkedin is hiring a developer network manager for their API

I just saw on Mashable a three days old post titled: “LinkedIn Seeks Warrior to Fend off Facebook“. It looks like Linkedin is looking for a new Developer Network Manager…

We are looking for a developer network manager who is part developer, part product manager, part marketer, part evangelist and, perhaps most importantly, can see how to take a nascent program and make it huge. This person can communicate the technology, encourage partner relationships, and set up communication vehicles that help make people successful at developing using LinkedIn APIs.

• Work with product management and development to define and prioritize new APIs and supporting technologies.
• Plan and execute the marketing and communications around the API program.
• Establish a new developer program from the ground up, including all communication, partner, and developer support mechanisms

The job posting is here so anyone in the San Francisco Bay Area (no relocation available) interested can apply…

I would love to get that position but I’m in Argentina and also I guess they are looking for something with quite big experience for that position… so, I hope anyone here would be interested in that…

Recommend: “Thoughts on the Social Graph”

An hour ago, my brother recommended me this short reading: “Thoughts on the Social Graph” by Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon.

Well, I think this is a really great article!!! They talk about “social graph” and they gave an interesting idea about how to solve the problem of many social websites as well as how to advance on this social future.

“Currently if you’re a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.”

They also mention some ideas on how to decentralize this idea that nowadays is running in just a few servers (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc):

“Ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as “the” central graph owner.”

They talked about the importance of having a good API and open source standards to achieve those goals:

“Establish a non-profit and open source software (with copyrights held by the non-profit) which collects, merges, and redistributes the graphs from all other social network sites into one global aggregated graph. This is then made available to other sites (or users) via both public APIs (for small/casual users) and downloadable data dumps, with an update stream / APIs, to get iterative updates to the graph (for larger users)”

As a final word, they gave a deep idea for different points of view that make this article more interesting: they mention the advantages of the social graph for companies, developers and end-users.

Just read this amazing article on: http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/ and add your two cents here if you want to.