How Would You Improve LinkedIn?

After bursting onto the scene to become the most popular professional networking site, LinkedIn seems to have gone the way of Delicious, making few updates to their platform and user experience, even as new technologies and user behaviors have changed. Meanwhile, Facebook is consistently making improvements that move in on LinkedIn's territory.

Don't get me wrong -- LinkedIn is great. But it could be a lot better. Here are a few ways they could do it:

Improve (HTML) formatting options: Most resumes exist in bullet form, so why doesn't LinkedIn give users the option of creating HTML formats in the job descriptions? Seems like an easy addition that will lead to cleaner, more organized descriptions of users' work experience.

Choose which connections receive updates: Facebook has privacy options for which friends see which updates. LinkedIn should have the same. The most obvious reason would be during a job search while still employed. Broadcasting to your network is often a better option than messaging your connections individually, but the problem with the current setup is that ALL your connections see the broadcasts, including your current colleagues. Maybe this is solved with an "I'm looking" indicator that is only seen by the people you want to be able to view it.

Non-recruiter job postings: I constantly hear about jobs via word of mouth, yet LinkedIn doesn't make it easy to share these jobs on their site. People are on LinkedIn for a reason -- to network. And the best people to have in your network are the ones sharing jobs not just at their own company, but at other organizations. Sure, recruiters and HR people can post jobs, but why not create an aggregator for jobs posted by people in your network that lives separately from the more formal "Jobs" section populated by recruiters and HR? You may not be able to apply directly, but at least you know who in your network can connect you to the right people.

Social links: Currently, there is a max of three links that can be part of a user profile, and a lot of people use at least one of those to link to their presence on another social networks.  With social networks like twitter and FriendFeed playing a larger role in how people market themselves, LinkedIn should provide an easy way for users to display their online presences.

That's where I would start.  What would you do to improve the LinkedIn experience?

Announcing: the minidisco

Inspired by Greg Verdino's Verdino Bytes, and indirectly kick-started by Steve Rubel's post on Posterous, I have created another blog. It is cleverly named the minidisco. Because, y'know, the main blog is discobeta. The new one is mini. You get it.

the minidisco fills a void that my blog, twitter and lifestreams (both crayon and FriendFeed) don't: the need for to me to post items (mostly unrelated to marketing) with as little thought-out commentary as possible. They are items that I find interesting, inspiring and humorous for reasons that generally speak for themselves. At least to me. A lot of the content is filtered to me through friends, so it also serves as a "best of" my custom social web.

Basically, it's fun, which is what creating content -- even if it's recycled -- is supposed to be.  Take a look and give it a subscribe if you like what you see.

Facebook: One Social Network to Rule Them All

The social media community is constantly talking about what's next. Brian Solis wrote earlier this week about FriendFeed becoming the next great conversation platform. There are countless conversations about twitter as a must-have for marketers and businesses, and as Mashable points out, it has seen massive growth in the past year.

You know who else has seen massive growth? Facebook, which now has two times as many unique visitors as MySpace. At this point, I barely know anyone under the age of 35 not on Facebook, and I am regularly being added by friends' parents and relatives I haven't heard from in years.

Facebook still rules as the top conversation platform, and here's why.

People value their friends on Facebook more than on any other social network. And the reason is because it is more personal. Most Facebook users know every single one of the people they are friends with -- from high school, from college, from working together. And in that time they interacted, they shared enough personal interaction that they trust those friends to be in their network.

Facebook, not twitter, is the biggest microblogging platform in the world. It may not be the most active, but the Facebook news feed, then the brilliant addition of comments on that feed, makes every user a microblogger.

Facebook is more interesting. Most people would rather read and watch what their friends are posting on Facebook than digest a heavier conversation happening elsewhere. It's the same reason I read the Google Shared items from my friends before I read any other feeds. I want to know what my friends are up to before delving into the rest of the noise out there.

Almost everyone you know is on Facebook, and only a few of them are on twitter or FriendFeed. Try posting your twitter name in your Facebook status and invite people to follow you. Your friends that are on twitter are already following you, and the rest haven't figured out the point of twitter.

Conversations on Facebook are real and genuine. And it is because the real people-to-marketer ratio is still appropriately intact. The walls that Facebook has put up to protect their users, although often lamented by advocates for an open web, have gone a long way to protect users from the "look at me" marketers on twitter.

So what does this mean? Facebook may not be as sexy as it used to be and it may not be where the early adopters are playing. But it is where the most active and genuine conversations are occurring with people that the users trust most -- their friends. Marketing with social media is about trust and conversation, and Facebook still has the most of both.

Dimitri the Lover

Dimitri has blazed his way into the internet consciousness in less than a week, starting with a couple of voicemails showcasing his talent in meeting and seducing "elegant" women, followed by the appearance of the "Official Web Site of Dimitri the Lover, Canada's greatest lover and seducer." Do a google search and you'll learn a bit more about Dimitri's past.

What struck me immediately after seeing the site is that Dimitri the Lover had to be a marketing campaign for...something. Maybe a movie or a web series. But so far, there doesn't seem to be anything more than a guy with a shady past who seems to be very good at marketing himself.

In a way, I enjoyed seeing something this entertaining rise through the internet ranks that wasn't powered by a brand with a savvy marketing team. It's another reminder of the power of the digital age and provides a fresh stream of YouTube parodies like this one.

Then again, Dimitri could still end up being a piece of "The Love Guru"'s marketing mix.

Filter the Filterless

I’m an information addict. Throughout the day, I bounce between Google Reader, Facebook and Twitter, while keeping a Gmail tab open at all times. I’m sharing articles, emailing, blogging and micro-blogging. But what I spend more of the day doing is keeping up with news, Twitter links, blog posts, Facebook updates and emails. And, still, I always feel like I’m behind. It’s impossible (and insane) to try and keep up with all the noise out there.

Initially, noise management came in the form of the RSS reader, pulling together feeds from blogs and news sources so you didn’t have to make multiple stops on the web. Then came blog aggregators, and as we embrace the term “social web”, we find ourselves with activity aggregators like FriendFeed and Facebook, whose activities’ can be dropped right back into RSS readers onto blogs. (Well, not Facebook – their information isn’t going anywhere.)

However, there is still the same amount of noise. It is now aggregated, but just as time consuming to go through. The most “social” thing about these services is being able to choose who to get information from. In terms of reducing the noise down to the items that matter most to an individual, there’s still a ways to go.

It will be interesting to see what the next generation of social aggregators will look like, and how well they will work. Services like FriendFeed and ReadBurner already have the framework in place, but it is still a matter of letting users view information through an even finer-toothed comb. Smart RSS readers like Illumio (via ReadWriteWeb) are focusing more directly on the problem by allowing users to set up specific preferences.

The next challenge for the social web is finding the balance between the information people want and information people need. If the web stays this noisy, they may begin to tune out.

This post also appears at DIGtrends.