5 ms·

The rise of LinkedIn’s news feed

60 points by japhyr 14y ago

endyourif 14y ago
yeah i've been seeing some nice traffic from them for articles i share with my community.
arturadib 14y ago
> "Feeds are now full of relevant engaging posts because LinkedIn user’s post stuff they think will be relevant to their audience" My 200+ connections must be very quiet - all I see in my feed are job title and skill changes. That being said, if LinkedIn enabled folks to follow without connecting, that could be very interesting indeed.
- bpatrianakos 14y ago
  I've seen the same thing. I really never could get into LinkedIn. I have an account and I rarely if ever use it. I don't see how it's social. That is to say, if it's about making connections in terms of career opportunities then I can use Facebook or Twitter to do that though I'll admit it's not exactly the same experience but still doable. The problem, for me at least, is that I'm not constantly looking to make career changes or network in those terms as often as I'd socialize on another social network. Much of my professional connections come from doing business with people offline and in person meetings. For me, LinkedIn is good for when someone meets you for a second then looks me up later on LinkedIn to sell me something or connect in a way that usually feels forced and spammy. But that's my personal experience. I have a handful of friends who take it seriously and say its quite helpful for networking so maybe my experience is not normal. I'm curious about others. Has LinkedIn served the purpose it set out to serve? I also wonder if your location matters. For instance if you're in the SV area I'm betting people are more likely to use it more often and find it useful but what about those in other parts of the country/world? I'm in Chicago, the third largest city in the US (should be number 2 but LA seems to include its suburbs as part of the city for some reason), and I just described my experience with it. Is that typical for people outside the Valley or is my experience just atypical?
- diminish 14y ago
  As a successful massive social network with engaged users Linked in makes me think what "engaged" truly means and how it can be measured. "X connected with Y. Z updated his profile." was all that comes out (I am a member since its first year) and now add to it some news. Linkedin seems to be club you went with all your ex/colleagues and ex/bosses. Since no one is drunk yet, no one dances or speaks. The only valuable engagement seems to be clicking on a profile of someone. Knowing that he will see you doing this, is what stops me from clicking. Finally, people mostly pay for membership due to this instinct to see "who looked at me?".
  - vbmnbv 14y ago
    So it's like Plenty of Fish, but for job hunting.
- tonfa 14y ago
  > That being said, if LinkedIn enabled folks to follow without connecting, that could be very interesting indeed. I thought that was the purpose of the groups.
Aloisius 14y ago
I use LinkedIn's news feed quite frequently, though through Flipboard. It is hard to compare it to Twitter because I follow a radically different group of people. First five stories from LinkedIn right now on my flipboard: How to evaluate whether or not you should join a startup How to Win Over someone Who Doesn't Like You Why termites explode Twitter Marketing Software How Disney Built a big data platform on a startup budget My Twitter feed however is filled with mostly political and local news stories.
runn1ng 14y ago
Hm. I am not a LinkedIn user, but I was under the impression that LinkedIn is something like "Facebook for people that are looking for a job" and I have it, in my mind, connected with "boring serious business" issues. (I am a student with a really small income, but not currently looking for a job.) Did LinkedIn somehow became a social sharing platform while I was not looking? When exactly? How do you connect "a better kind of CV" (which I always thought is LI purpose) with social sharing?
- dasil003 14y ago
  Like a cocktail party but online.
joshhart 14y ago
I'm a tech lead working on the feed backend at LinkedIn. I work both on storage and feed relevance. Happy to answer any questions if I can. I will say we're always looking for passionate engineers, especially those with a background in machine learning or information retrieval.
- ohashi 14y ago
  What do you see as the primary goal of the news feed?
  - joshhart 14y ago
    LinkedIn's mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. In that light, there are a few things that I consider the goal to be: 1. Keep you informed of relevant news, articles, and changes in your network. There are examples of where it's difficult to do a perfect job. Connection updates are one - some people absolutely want to see them all and some don't. We're trying to be smarter by collapsing them together, which saves a lot of vertical space, and we're working on algorithms to identify the most "interesting" ones. Fortunately, it's very easy to tune which types of updates you receive in your settings if you really want to. 2. Give you the opportunity to interact with news, articles, shares etc and hence demonstrate authority or interest in a topic among your network. We obviously look at the traffic we're generating to publishers and to other LinkedIn verticals like groups, but those aren't numbers that we're trying to optimize.
- benhamner 14y ago
  How are you evaluating feed relevance?
  - joshhart 14y ago
    There are a lot of metrics we look at. The most straightforward are engagement numbers, particularly the social variety (like, comment, reshare, etc), normalized by various measures like impressions or sessions. LinkedIn does a fair bit of user studies as well, and we're hoping to go further in this are for feed relevance.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Meh. I use LinkedIn for job leads. And that's only when necessary. I've been getting increasingly spammed by the site, and am getting consistently lower and lower quality recruiter contacts (both on and off LI), in conjunction with a number of privacy-violating moves, which have lead me to greatly reduce the information on my profile. LinkedIn has a certain role, but shouldn't push too far beyond that. Twitter? What's that?
hapless 14y ago
I turned off the news feed the second day I saw it. As it turns out, I don't really want to receive articles shared by every professional contact I've ever had. "People I've worked with" is just not a good filter function for content.

60 points by japhyr 14y ago

yeah i've been seeing some nice traffic from them for articles i share with my community.

> "Feeds are now full of relevant engaging posts because LinkedIn user’s post stuff they think will be relevant to their audience" My 200+ connections must be very quiet - all I see in my feed are job title and skill changes. That being said, if LinkedIn enabled folks to follow without connecting, that could be very interesting indeed.

bpatrianakos 14y ago
I've seen the same thing. I really never could get into LinkedIn. I have an account and I rarely if ever use it. I don't see how it's social. That is to say, if it's about making connections in terms of career opportunities then I can use Facebook or Twitter to do that though I'll admit it's not exactly the same experience but still doable. The problem, for me at least, is that I'm not constantly looking to make career changes or network in those terms as often as I'd socialize on another social network. Much of my professional connections come from doing business with people offline and in person meetings. For me, LinkedIn is good for when someone meets you for a second then looks me up later on LinkedIn to sell me something or connect in a way that usually feels forced and spammy. But that's my personal experience. I have a handful of friends who take it seriously and say its quite helpful for networking so maybe my experience is not normal. I'm curious about others. Has LinkedIn served the purpose it set out to serve? I also wonder if your location matters. For instance if you're in the SV area I'm betting people are more likely to use it more often and find it useful but what about those in other parts of the country/world? I'm in Chicago, the third largest city in the US (should be number 2 but LA seems to include its suburbs as part of the city for some reason), and I just described my experience with it. Is that typical for people outside the Valley or is my experience just atypical?
diminish 14y ago
As a successful massive social network with engaged users Linked in makes me think what "engaged" truly means and how it can be measured. "X connected with Y. Z updated his profile." was all that comes out (I am a member since its first year) and now add to it some news. Linkedin seems to be club you went with all your ex/colleagues and ex/bosses. Since no one is drunk yet, no one dances or speaks. The only valuable engagement seems to be clicking on a profile of someone. Knowing that he will see you doing this, is what stops me from clicking. Finally, people mostly pay for membership due to this instinct to see "who looked at me?".
- vbmnbv 14y ago
  So it's like Plenty of Fish, but for job hunting.
tonfa 14y ago
> That being said, if LinkedIn enabled folks to follow without connecting, that could be very interesting indeed. I thought that was the purpose of the groups.

Aloisius 14y ago

I use LinkedIn's news feed quite frequently, though through Flipboard. It is hard to compare it to Twitter because I follow a radically different group of people. First five stories from LinkedIn right now on my flipboard: How to evaluate whether or not you should join a startup How to Win Over someone Who Doesn't Like You Why termites explode Twitter Marketing Software How Disney Built a big data platform on a startup budget My Twitter feed however is filled with mostly political and local news stories.

runn1ng 14y ago

Hm. I am not a LinkedIn user, but I was under the impression that LinkedIn is something like "Facebook for people that are looking for a job" and I have it, in my mind, connected with "boring serious business" issues. (I am a student with a really small income, but not currently looking for a job.) Did LinkedIn somehow became a social sharing platform while I was not looking? When exactly? How do you connect "a better kind of CV" (which I always thought is LI purpose) with social sharing?

dasil003 14y ago
Like a cocktail party but online.

joshhart 14y ago

I'm a tech lead working on the feed backend at LinkedIn. I work both on storage and feed relevance. Happy to answer any questions if I can. I will say we're always looking for passionate engineers, especially those with a background in machine learning or information retrieval.

ohashi 14y ago
What do you see as the primary goal of the news feed?
- joshhart 14y ago
  LinkedIn's mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. In that light, there are a few things that I consider the goal to be: 1. Keep you informed of relevant news, articles, and changes in your network. There are examples of where it's difficult to do a perfect job. Connection updates are one - some people absolutely want to see them all and some don't. We're trying to be smarter by collapsing them together, which saves a lot of vertical space, and we're working on algorithms to identify the most "interesting" ones. Fortunately, it's very easy to tune which types of updates you receive in your settings if you really want to. 2. Give you the opportunity to interact with news, articles, shares etc and hence demonstrate authority or interest in a topic among your network. We obviously look at the traffic we're generating to publishers and to other LinkedIn verticals like groups, but those aren't numbers that we're trying to optimize.
benhamner 14y ago
How are you evaluating feed relevance?
- joshhart 14y ago
  There are a lot of metrics we look at. The most straightforward are engagement numbers, particularly the social variety (like, comment, reshare, etc), normalized by various measures like impressions or sessions. LinkedIn does a fair bit of user studies as well, and we're hoping to go further in this are for feed relevance.

dredmorbius 14y ago

Meh. I use LinkedIn for job leads. And that's only when necessary. I've been getting increasingly spammed by the site, and am getting consistently lower and lower quality recruiter contacts (both on and off LI), in conjunction with a number of privacy-violating moves, which have lead me to greatly reduce the information on my profile. LinkedIn has a certain role, but shouldn't push too far beyond that. Twitter? What's that?

hapless 14y ago

I turned off the news feed the second day I saw it. As it turns out, I don't really want to receive articles shared by every professional contact I've ever had. "People I've worked with" is just not a good filter function for content.