Sad Clown

LinkedIn is updating its service to include profile photos. Before you get too excited, the max size of these photos is 80×80 and there will be an option to opt out. I think I am going to let our sister site Techspoofs handle the rest of the snark and then I’ll get to the point.

LinkedIn

From Techspoofs,

I’m glad you decided to come back LinkedIn. I know things have been hard on you since F8. The feelings of insecurity are only natural. Being the Jan Brady of the social networking family has to take its toll on you.

No, please, no more tears. We have been through this. Good, good. It will all be OK.

What I really wanted to discuss with you was your new “addition”. Trust me when I say this, everyone can see right through you. When Facebook went out and got Super Poke and Zombie Tag and everyone thought he was just so cool, it was just a matter of time — wasn’t it?

Don’t look at me like that. I am trying to help.

You don’t have to try so hard. Your real friends love you LinkedIn. Just because all those mean folks in the blogosphere don’t remember you from a hole in the wall, doesn’t mean that you have to act out like this…

Web 2.0 Roundup

What stuns me more than the fact that this is news is the fact that LinkedIn has taken such a long time to roll out a feature like this. I know that LinkedIn has spent its product cycle trying to be a “different kind of social network,” but there comes a point when you must realize that you can’t let corporate ego get in the way of growth.

For the longest time people have been opting out of LinkedIn, and incremental improvements like easy to use groups and picture profiles just aren’t going to solve the problem. The basic flaw with LinkedIn is that users do not feel any real connection to the system. There are so many barriers between profiles, and so few ways to really “interact” with your network that other than an easy means of keeping a virtual Rolodex, it’s hard to really see the point.

If anyone from LinkedIn is reading this, here are a few thoughts on how the service could be improved without seriously affecting your culture.

User Interaction. The reason for keeping a rolodex is help me keep in touch with professional contacts. Right now, LinkedIn is purely a storage medium. The single most important change that could be made to the system is a feature that would allow me to easily share information with my contacts or sets of contacts.

Strange UI elements. There is a lot of strange “information” that could be clipped to help focus personal profiles. I have been looking at my “Network Completeness” score for almost a year now, and I still don’t really understand why I should care.

Call To Action. This might be the hardest problem to solve. LinkedIn lacks one of the most important elements of a social network — a call to action. Unless someone has added me to their network, I never feel compelled to explore LinkedIn. I know that the service is not trying to be Facebook or MySpace in that regards, but it could take some real lessons from them in terms of user engagement.

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