LinkedIn's new user interface rolled out January of this year, the largest desktop redesign since the website launched.
Have you noticed, or haven't you logged in yet this year?
I have mixed feelings about the organizational hierarchy of menu items and how notifications are laid out, though I do appreciate having control to turn off birthday notifications. I'm also a fan of the improved search experience. However, I will always long for the Q&A feature that got knocked off years ago, and somehow suspiciously ended up as Quora (at least in my skeptical mind).
The mobile app has also seen some recent changes. The one that strikes me as most interesting is the addition of photo editing.
To give you a quick and easy way to enhance and crop your existing photos—yes, even a selfie or group photo—we’ve added photo editing in our mobile app. There are now six photo filters available, and you can also crop and edit the brightness, contrast, saturation and vignette of your LinkedIn profile photo.
People really upload selfies to LinkedIn? Filters on professional profile photos sound a bit risqué to me. Just what are they trying to encourage here, creativity?
This morning's boot up along with saved tab set opening resulted in a pretty significant surprise - Facebook style messaging. The inbox isn't gone, but there's a pop up chat box, and your most recent contacts.
I feel like LinkedIn leadership may be having an identity crisis, feeling like what was great was no longer good enough. Like they meditated on what they perceive to be the most popular features of other social networking platforms - kind of a best practices approach, and integrated them into their professional online networking space. You know, let's take the best of Facebook and Instagram, hijack it, and compile it into the motherload.
Along with the features of other successful social sites I'm also witnessing the evolution of user behavior. Bake in chat, image editing, and birthday notifications - and you get more informal, social behavior. And, for good or bad, whether you're a fan or not, that's exactly what I see happening.
Perhaps next up are self-destructing messages.
From 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest) where are you are with your love for LinkedIn?
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