As the hub of professional conversation on the web, LinkedIn wants to make sure you have an efficient Inbox that improves your productivity. It’s a place where you can quickly and easily manage messages from your connections and invitation requests from colleagues and classmates.
Recently, we started rolling out our new Inbox to some of our members and soon all of you will be seeing it (if you haven’t already). Check out a 1 minute video to see some of these enhancements.
Highlights of the Inbox upgrade include:
Here are your oft requested features that will be incorporated into your LinkedIn Inbox moving forward. Thanks for your feedback and comments.
1. New look and feel: Inbox and module on home page are now redesigned to be simpler and more intuitive. We’ve separated invitations and messages into two separate tabs making it easier for you to view and respond to your pending invitations.
2. Bulk actions: You can now archive a number of similar messages at once, making your Inbox even easier to maintain and control. You can also bulk accept or ignore invitations making connecting with others a snap.
3. Delete: The top request from our users was the ability to delete messages. Done and done.
This is just one more step in improving your LinkedIn Inbox experience. We hope you enjoy your new Inbox.
And we invite you to continue sending us any feedback. Please feel free to leave a comment on this post or @linkedin us on Twitter.
In March, LinkedIn launched our first native application for the Blackberry. While we knew this was one of our most hotly requested new features, the rapid adoption of the new app has been amazing to watch. Since the debut of LinkedIn for BlackBerry 1.0, the team has been working hard on an update that addresses some of the major requests from our members. The result of that work is now available for download as LinkedIn for BlackBerry v1.1. You can download it directly from LinkedIn right now:
LinkedIn for BlackBerry 1.1 will also be available for download from the BlackBerry App World application on your smartphone shortly. We now support the following BlackBerry models: Tour, Curve, Bold, Pearl, Storm and over 21 devices running BlackBerry OS v4.3 or later.
New Device Support
The new version of LinkedIn for BlackBerry adds support for the Storm and Pearl families of devices. Getting access to LinkedIn on these devices has been a top request from our users, and this release continues our efforts to help you leverage the power of your professional network anytime, anywhere.
Bem-vindo! Benvenuto!
As we grow internationally, it’s increasingly important that we enable our members to interact with our mobile applications in their native language. Like LinkedIn.com, LinkedIn for BlackBerry is now localized for our members in Italy and Brazil:
Profile Updates Get Smarter
With the new version of LinkedIn for BlackBerry, we provide more detail of what your connections have been changing on their profile. You can now see what sections have been changed (Education, Headline, Experience, etc.), as well as when your connections add things like an Instant Messenger account, Twitter account, or add their birthday to their profile.
With these changes it is now much easier to keep up with what your network is doing while mobile.
We’re Listening
In addition to the new devices and profile update changes, we’ve also listened to the user community and addressed a number of issues they have raised in the LinkedIn for BlackBerry group and through our feedback email address. In addition to these fixes, our existing users should also see some improvements in how we use fonts, as well as some improvements to how we update the BlackBerry Contacts application when you’ve enabled address book integration with LinkedIn.
The BlackBerry platform continues to be a top priority for the LinkedIn mobile team, so expect regular enhancements and additions to the application throughout the rest of 2010. If you are one of our LinkedIn for BlackBerry users, please join the conversation in the LinkedIn for BlackBerry group.
We’re very excited to hear from you and hear suggestions for new features and improvements.
LinkedIn for BlackBerry v1.1 is live and available immediately. Get it now.
Ed. note: This is a post from Adam Trachtenberg, who runs LinkedIn’s Developer Network team, Adam’s working with developers and partners on making their LinkedIn integration as valuable for our users as possible Check out some of the partner integrations we announced earlier this year. And, if you are a developer please visit our Developer Network site.
It has only been a few weeks since I joined the LinkedIn Platform team, but I’m excited to get the opportunity to announce some great new capabilities that we’ve added for thousands of LinkedIn developers who are working to integrate LinkedIn into their business applications.
Search is one of the highest volume features at LinkedIn, largely because many business tasks first involve finding the right person. Today, we’re announcing a major enhancement to our Search API, based on the new faceted search engine that we made available to users earlier this year.
Faceted Search generates dynamic filters based on the results of any query submitted to the LinkedIn search engine. These filters let you quickly and easily hone a query based on a wide variety of dimensions, including current company, past company, location, relationship, industry, school, and profile language.
As a developer, this means that any query submitted to LinkedIn now has the option to return not only the results, but also important analytical information about the results. For example, a query for “product manager” might return hundreds of thousands of results, sorted by relevance for the user. With the new facets, your application will also be able to see the top companies for those results, as well as the result counts for each company.
For users, this means that the same powerful refinements that you can now make on the LinkedIn website can be made in any application that integrates LinkedIn search. We’ve also increased the throttle limits on the new API to help users and developers take advantage of this rich functionality.
In addition to this new API, we’ve also made a number of smaller enhancements in the past few weeks. We’ve enhanced our profile APIs to return additional fields like Twitter ID. We’ve also updated our Status API to allow users to send their LinkedIn status to Twitter. We’ve also added a number of new network updates types to our Network Updates API.
Expect more from us in the future. In the meantime, drop on by our forums, introduce yourself, share what you’re building, and let us know how things are going!
One of the most common requests we receive is for help finding relevant professionals to follow on Twitter. I’m happy to post that starting today, we’ll be rolling out a significant improvement to our Tweets application that allows LinkedIn members to easily find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
Once you’ve installed the Tweets application, you can easily access it from anywhere on LinkedIn using the “More…” menu at the top of the website.
The Overview tab has been updated with an improved design to help you easily find everyone you currently follow on Twitter, view their Twitter feed, and tweet from your own account.
A new module, “Connections to Follow”, has been added to recommend new people for you to follow, based on your LinkedIn connections.
View all of your LinkedIn connections on Twitter
A new tab has been added to Tweets called “Connections”. On this screen, you can see all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles. Simple navigation is provided to make it easy to see who you are and aren’t following on Twitter.
Connections Tab in the LinkedIn Tweets application
You can easily see the Twitter information for any of your connections, follow or unfollow them, and even see a sample of their last tweet by hovering over their Twitter ID.
Making a list, Checking it twice
One of the most useful features of the new Tweets application is the ability to save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter list.
When you click the link to save your connections as a Twitter list, LinkedIn will create a private Twitter list for all of your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts. More importantly, LinkedIn will automatically keep this list up-to-date, adding and removing Twitter accounts to the list daily based on your LinkedIn connections.
This makes it extremely easy to keep track of what your LinkedIn connections are tweeting about in any Twitter client that supports Twitter lists.
View the Twitter feed of your LinkedIn connections as a Twitter list
Time to Get Tweets
If you haven’t installed Tweets yet, you can add it by going to the Tweets install page. Add it to your homepage to keep track of your twitter lists right from LinkedIn, or add it to your profile if you want to include your most recent tweets.
While you’re there, don’t be afraid to add your Twitter account to your LinkedIn profile and install Company Buzz as well, our popular application for saving and tracking companies, keywords, brands and products on Twitter.
Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts on how web sites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality using the LinkedIn API. This post is from Andy McLoughlin, co founder of Huddle.net. Huddle is one of the leading project management apps on the LinkedIn platform.
Would you like to improve the way you work and communicate with your team and other organizations at the touch of a button?
In today’s 24/7 digital world, marketing teams worldwide are often tasked with managing multiple business relationships across the globe. Not only are they expected to share information and results with the board, various internal teams, and other departments, but these teams are also faced with the challenge of sharing documents, images and plans with external PR and design agencies, partners and suppliers.
With email often struggling to cope with attachments, communicating and collaborating effectively presents marketing teams with a big problem. Saving files on a local computer or server and emailing them back and forth can result in wasted time, lost files, the wrong versions being used and attachments failing to make it over external firewalls. The customized Huddle application for LinkedIn – Huddle Workspaces – aims to solve this issue and more.
Huddle Workspaces offers private online work spaces for secure team collaboration, document sharing and discussions within the LinkedIn network. With just one click, Huddle and LinkedIn give people an opportunity to get more out of their profile and collaborate more effectively with their network of contacts. Rather than having materials for a project stored in numerous different places, everything can be stored and accessed in one place online
Using Huddle Workspaces is simple. Material can be uploaded and instantly accessed by everyone involved in a project, regardless of their location. There’s no question about which is the latest version of the document and people don’t have to waste time hunting for attachments in their Inbox. Email traffic can also be reduced as people can share opinions and talk about projects via the discussion tool.
There is also a key benefit for agencies as Huddle ensures that they can stay in constant contact with their clients and everyone has full visibility of deadlines and content. As Huddle Workspaces takes just a few seconds to set up and the potential for reducing wasted time and increasing efficiency is endless, why not give it a go?
If you’re already using Huddle Workspaces and would like to expand the tools you use to include project management, online meeting facilities, wikis and media management, just one click will take you to the main Huddle.net app and you can get started right away!
Today at LinkedIn we’re celebrating the achievement of creating the world’s largest centipede to ever run (okay, stroll) the ING Bay to Breakers. Yesterday at the obnoxious hour of five am, thirty of us gathered in San Francisco to attempt the monumental task of creating an in person manifestation of a LinkedIn network. Our mission: to connect at least 2027 people at the world’s largest foot race, (aka San Francisco’s seven mile block party) in an attempt to break the Guinness world record for longest human centipede.
Armed with megaphones and 5 miles worth of “Connect with me” police tape, we hit the streets looking to sign up volunteers. Like any new network, the first few hundred people were hard to assemble — convincing people to tie themselves to thousands of other people is oddly much harder than it sounds. Our volunteers pressed on turning skeptics into participants and hastily gathered the signatures needed to serve as proof to scrutinizing Guinness Book of World Records’ judges. Our centipede began to grow through word of mouth, each new member asking another new member to join in.
Ten minutes before the start, we hit critical mass and pandemonium ensued. At this point, we had documented over 1600 people, (I personally counted 4 Elvis’s, a few dozen clowns, and a handful chickens to boot), but our process went out the window as the centipede took on a life of its own. Sign up sheets were ditched as our volunteers worked at breakneck speed to connect the swarms of people who rushed to join in the final minutes before the start.
Tallying sign up sheets for the Guinness Record
In the end, our historic arthropod stretched over several blocks and continued to add new connections as the front of the creature marched forward. Thanks to all who participated! While it appears we may have broken the record, Elizabeth Guerra, our tireless recorder is still reviewing the signature lists and video footage to deem whether it can be submitted for the official title. Documentation aside, it was great fun connecting with you all and taking part in this irreverent Bay Area tradition.
UPDATE: The count is in. We have 2375 signatures that we’ve submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Check out the entire set of pictures taken at Bay to Breakers here.
Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts on how web sites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality using the LinkedIn API. This post is from John Stormer at TimeBridge, a “Personal Scheduling Assistant that works across calendaring systems, companies and time zones to help busy people find time for a meeting – fast”.
Ever want an icebreaker to kick off a meeting? Chances are you share school ties or have a contact in common with fellow meeting attendees. TimeBridge, a web app that helps you schedule and run great meetings, has got your back with the new LinkedIn Profile Widget, fully integrated into TimeBridge’s Meeting Room. The Meeting Room is a page for organizers and attendees to access to all pertinent meeting details and materials. Now, you can easily acquaint yourself with everyone at the meeting in seconds, save time on long introductions, and get straight to the work at hand.
To access this integration in your next TimeBridge meeting, head to your Meeting Room, and scroll your mouse over the LinkedIn icon next to an attendee’s name. An abbreviated version of the attendee’s LinkedIn profile will pop up displaying his or her current position, education, and relevant websites. From there, click on the widget to see their full profile, and even request to connect on LinkedIn.
TimeBridge is a service that brings busy people together for great meetings and we thought it was important to connect our users to another professional network. We tapped LinkedIn’s oAuth API platform because they are a trusted and well-used source for the most relevant professional data and most pertinent details. TimeBridge believes in the immense power of weak ties to foster a better meeting experience for all participants.
Try it out for yourself! Make your meetings more open, connected, personal, and social, and expand your network as you meet. TimeBridge and LinkedIn are working together to build better meetings and a stronger business app ecosystem so that you can work smarter.
Did you know that “People You May Know” was invented here at LinkedIn? Staying in touch with your current contacts and reconnecting with old or lost ones is a critical part of establishing your professional identity and People You May Know is a powerful way to find those connections.
Every day we get lots of great feedback from users on this feature and we’ve been listening! With our revamped People You May Know, we have now taken the power of this product and made it even better by merging it with another powerful feature, faceted search. These facets make it easier to filter the list of people you may know by companies and schools. With these improvements, you will be able to page through all of your suggestions on the landing page, and quickly filter them by company or school or see which connections you have in common.
How do you get there? Click on the “See More” link on the “People You May Know” box and in just a few clicks you can get through the entire list of people you may know and connect with the the right connections.
From this page you can filter this giant list of possible connections in a variety of ways. Maybe you want to filter by those unknown connections currently working at Yahoo. Or maybe you are looking for that long lost colleague who used to work with you at Genentech and also went to school at UCSF. Or perhaps they are working at Cisco these days, but they used to work at Accenture and IBM.
Here is a quick video demo that walks you through the enhanced features of the new “People You May Know” experience.
This is just the beginning in helping you quickly find and make those connections. We’d love to hear your feedback on this feature as we roll it out to all of our users over the next few days. Feel free to either leave a comment on this post or send us your feedback via twitter – @linkedin.
Ed. note: This belongs to a series of posts on how web sites and services are integrating LinkedIn functionality using the LinkedIn API. Rashmi Sinha is co-founder and CEO for SlideShare, one of the most popular apps on LinkedIn, which lets everyone from marketers, speakers and educators share professional content with one another.
Every time I run into someone who uses the SlideShare app on LinkedIn, I ask them what they share using the app. Often I hear about slides from a talk, webinar, artist portfolio or whitepaper.
But not infrequently, I hear from someone who also wants to share the video of their talk, a screencast or a demo. They like sharing their slides and documents with their networks and want to share videos in the same way.
Starting today, we are embracing video as a new format you can share using the SlideShare app on LinkedIn. It’s the same simple method of sharing. Upload your file, and share with your network. Or browse profiles of your network to see their videos.
In a similar manner, we are also expanding to include videos on SlideShare. If you have connected your LinkedIn account with your SlideShare account, your video files will show up in both places.
Bring on all your professional videos, talks, screencasts, demos and webinars – anything you would like to share with your professional network.
Our long-term vision is to embrace any format that professionals share content in. Today, it is presentations, documents and videos; tomorrow, we may add a new format that becomes popular with professionals.
Once the video is uploaded, you will be directed to a video page, from where you can share the video on LinkedIn, Twitter and other social networks in the same way that you can do with presentations.
Ed. note: This is a special edition post on folks working at LinkedIn talking about their true passion – at work and in the real world. This week’s post comes from Armen Vartanian, who’s not only training to break a world record at Bay to Breakers this year but also encouraging you to do the same!
Happy Cinco de LinkedIn — our 7th birthday anniversary and cause for celebration. This year, in honor of our big day, we’re attempting something big. Really big. Guinness World Records BIG. At one of the world’s largest and oldest footraces, ING Bay to Breakers (May 16, 2010), we’ll be attempting to form the world’s longest human centipede, requiring over 2,026 people. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to set a world record and we would like for you, your friends and colleagues to be a part of this historic event. Through the power of our LinkedIn networks we can make this happen!
It’s so easy for us professionals to get caught up in the daily grind and forget to balance out our lives. We need to reward ourselves for the hard work that we put in day-to-day and do that in a manner that fully utilizes our passion. And, this year’s Bay to Breakers is one such opportunity to balance out serious work with serious fun.
I currently train with the goal of being a 2012 Olympian, but one of the runs I look forward to most is my Friday evening runs with my LinkedIn coworkers. It’s the camaraderie built while running with my colleagues and the opportunity to share my passion with them, which makes these runs one of the workouts I look forward to most – for the fun, not necessarily the speed training! The Bay to Breakers centipede is going to be just like those Friday evening runs….on a much larger scale. People from all walks of life, linking up and enjoying the day together, whether that’s through running or walking or maybe wearing a costume.
Be a part of the world's longest centipede this year at Bay to Breakers!
In addition to the “Worlds Longest Centipede” record, we are also attempting to be the “World’s Fastest Centipede”. I’ve networked within the running community to bring together a team of Olympic hopefuls and elite marathoners hoping to win and set a new world record for the 12k distance. The team consists of athletes at the highest level of competition. They include: Chris Chavez, Stephan Shay, David Kinsella, Austin Ramos, Drew and Kyle Shackleton, along with a few other speedsters. I’m really excited that so many of my LinkedIn running companions will be there too setting a record of their own as well as supporting us. Hopefully we’ll see you out there!
If you’d like to link up and be a part of this record-breaking attempt, register hereand show up race morning at Corral E. Organizers will hand out limited edition “In” sweatbands along with connecting tape to keep the centipede together. All centipede members must register individually. If you have already registered, just show up at Corral E on race day.
For more information, join the LinkedIn World Record Breaker group here. And, invite your friends and colleagues from your LinkedIn network to participate.
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As the hub of professional conversation on the web, LinkedIn wants to make sure you have an efficient Inbox that improves your productivity. It’s a place where you can quickly and easily manage messages from your connections and invitation requests from colleagues and classmates.
