Dear LinkedIn – It’s Time To Grow
Yes, I love LinkedIn, but as in any loving relationship I feel the need to let the other side know there are some things preventing me from growing together. Too harsh? I think not. Let’s look at the facts.
Fact 1. Connect with your colleagues. Yes, I’d love too! You click, you get a dialogue window, you select the people you actually know and whose emails you do have, and… nothing! Half of the time LinkedIn either doesn’t send them the connection requests, OR spams them several times. I understand that comparing your new ‘love’ to others isn’t at all cool, but let’s face it LinkedIn, you can take a page of Facebook’s book (a little ‘bookception’ going on here) now and then; not that Facebook doesn’t have a lot of improving to do. Hence, if you’re going to offer this option, you can at least make sure the notification gets to the proper user, and also try to not have them in the list anymore, as to avoid spamming.
Fact 2. Fake accounts, spammers and phishers. Seriously, LinkedIn?! Some creates an account, and sets up a profile saying he works AT LinkedIn and you have no way of figuring out this is spam? ‘Accountants’, ‘lawyers’, ‘barristers’, etc. from London send out spam inbox messages about the recipient getting a million dollar rewards, along with the typical ‘Nigerian Prince’ BS and you have no spam/phishing filters?
Fact 3. Mobile app. Horrible. No options whatsoever. Remember the spammers/phishers issue? Well, in the mobile app it is not possible to:
- Get out of a stupid spammy conversation in messages,
- Report the spammer and his profile,
- Report the conversation
Bonus bugs/shortcomings
- No way to post in groups
- No way to access groups – you only get the top discussions
- Repetitive users ‘you may know’ and whom you’ve already sent an invite to.
Conclusion
You are very cool in your own nerdy way, LinkedIn, but do try to pick up some tricks from the Big Bad Facebook and add a checkbox to invites and mark them invited if once ticked to avoid spam.
Get those spammers in order, strap in some advanced spam filters and copy some long spammy keywords that you don’t want people getting in the inbox. See Google for more reference.
Get your mobile app up to date. Groups are a killer feature and if they cannot be properly used from the mobile app, then you are losing half of your potential ‘influencers’. Oh yeah, while we are on the subject, users can’t publish posts from mobile either. Ever heard of mobile journalism?
That’s all. Please get back to me at your convenience, minus the ‘we’re working on it’ excuse, because it’s unbecoming.
Sincerely yours,
A concerned user.
