Profile surfing and anonymity: Linkedin feature change

-
One of the reasons I ended up visiting LinkedIn often (recent comment from an engineer looking at "My most visited " list - "LinkedIn shows up twice..really?") is their "Who's viewed My Profile" box.
Clicking through on the link a few weeks ago, gave you a snippet of people that had viewed your profile. The information was deliberately vague ("Someone at Google", "Someone in the IT industry" etc. ), but interesting in the voyeuristic ways these things tend to be.

So I was intrigued when LinkedIn changed this feature a couple of weeks ago. Now, the only way you get to see this information is if you opt to make your own information completely public (i.e. clicking on the profile above would show the person's actual name; link to their profile etc.)

This change simultaneously makes the the feature more interesting, and less likely to be used. I'd love to see the internal stats on how users have reacted to this change.

This approach is somewhere right in the middle. The extremes are the way Orkut used to be and no longer is (you could always see the full information on who'd viewed your profile) and the Facebook approach (that information was never available to you.)

On balance the results suggest Facebook got it right. The externality (i.e. evidence that people know you saw their profile) prevents people from spending more time on the site and actually surfing profiles. Perhaps the fact that LinkedIn surfing tends to be more professional and the fact that they have a user base used to this behavior will allow them to make this successful.

If anyone picks this data up or has other ideas about this, do let me know. :)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The "Rescue Me" minisodes

-
I'm a fan of the FX show " Rescue Me " I was lukewarm when Dennis Leary mentioned the mini-sodes on his Daily Show visit. But, for the Rescue Me's particular situation it works really well. First the mini-sodes are actually good! they use characters from the story and tell a little anecdote they were clearly pretty cheap to produce through what seems like a little bit of complicated mess, they're distributing like crazy: YouTube , Crackle (Sony's site), the FX site (powered by Brightcove), Hulu These do exactly what they're supposed to do new episodes aren't coming till Spring 2009 , the fans need something to tide them over and keep the show in their memory: done potentially rope in new fans (short episodes, lower commitment to start watching the show) without freaking out old school media which is loathe to risk potential DVD sales by putting older episodes/clips online: done Its not completely clear to me how much this is by their own design, and
Read more

A short love letter to ~8 years on Google Search - 8 things I’m grateful for.

-
  After a few weeks off, I started a new gig within Google yesterday and it hit me that for the first time in almost eight years I won’t be working on some part of Google Search. Eight years ago, I told the team when I was interviewing that I was “looking for a place to call home for a while and grow there”. My experiences here more than met that need.  I used to write a regular “10 things about…” listy column for a while at a college newspaper. So in that style here’s 8 things (one for each year) I feel grateful to have experienced/learned in this time. Also, like that column which I banged out the night before it was due, this post is something that I don’t need to do, yet I feel somehow compelled to do (and so it’ll likely be longer and less crisp than it should be :-))    It actually is awesome to work on something so many people use and love, and that positively touches people’s lives. There’s a talk I give externally about Search and a line I often end up using is how the mission
Read more

Avengers Endgame: how trivial passions can nudge a career

-
Image
The Internets reminded me that today was exactly 2 years since Avenger's Endgame was released. I remember that day vividly for a few reasons I woke up before sunrise (way before the alarm went off).   I wore this (now that I think about it) borderline appropriate T-shir t and then..  .. showed up before 7:00am to watch that movie at Century Shoreline before going to work.  This is still the only movie that has a scene that can make me tear up consistently every single time (I know, I know - it's ridiculous).  That day was interesting from a work perspective for another reason. Along with a few other people at work (and with some crazy last-minute negotiating), we'd pulled together the Thanos Easter Egg on Search. It was typical of a lot of Easter Eggs on Search at the time, in that it wasn't really anybody's job, but we pushed it through because we loved the idea enough to do it. My day job on Media experience on Search helped me justify it a little bit I guess.
Read more