What's happening on LinkedIn Today?

No sooner did I publish my post with an interesting observation how the majority of LinkedIn’s users don’t actually use LinkedIn all that much, LinkedIn rolled out a new news product called LinkedIn Today which makes more sense of all the news links people share in LinkedIn updates.

This is a pretty interesting move and what appeals to me quite a bit about the update is how the news integrates into the updated iPhone app:

I have two news apps on my iPhone which I consider indispensable: Feedly and Instapaper (the Instapaper app has been updated to version 3.0 and it looks even better now). The LinkedIn app has just become a lot more useful and appealing to me, possibly to the point where it competes for my attention when I want to sit down for a few minutes and catch up on some news.

It is a great addition to LinkedIn that makes it more of the sort of site I want to spend some time on consuming news and content, rather than just a place to visit quickly to connect to someone or check a discussion topic posting. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like LinkedIn has given the app nearly enough exposure. It is accessible through a miscellaneous folder and my landing page is still my default when loading LinkedIn. I would rather have the option of seeing news content when loading LinkedIn, or at least have the news app accessible through a more prominent link.

On that note, if the product is called “LinkedIn Today”, why is the link labelled “News”? This aspect of the new product hasn’t been implemented very well at all. Otherwise, I like it. I will probably use it more in the iPhone app but the layout on the site itself is pretty good too.

So will this bring more active users to LinkedIn and help boost LinkedIn as a business networking site? That remains to be seen. I find that most of my contacts whose updates I see in my Updates stream are populating their LinkedIn streams with tweets and are not spending that much time on LinkedIn itself engaging with each other on the site. For many people it is a glorified resume site. Let’s see if that changes.