 I woke up and logged into my phone to read the trending news on Flipboard :
Flipboard is your personal magazine, filled with the things you care about. Catch up on the news, discover amazing things from around the world, or stay connected to the people closest to you--all in one place. I next click on the news headlines from Yahoo News. Then I check out the weather.com box to see the beach weather and surf advisory. Finally I check the text messages from family. The information is all condensed, succinct and exactly what I want to read. Why? I pick the weather location, choose and curate by topic the magazines, and the news publications that I want to see. Well I don't pick my family. Then I go to Linkedin.com. I spend a lot of time there helping my clients build jaw-dropping profiles (just kidding, really, how much can you do with an inflexible template?). I actually help them quickly build out their networks to number in the thousands not the hundreds, decide on the best skills to list for endorsement, the most strategic groups to join, and the optimum wording for the over-structured profile template. While on Linkedin I go to my home page and there, chosen by Linkedin, are articles they have curated for me (they call it recommended). Why are they there? They did their algorithms on me and assume that's what I want to read based on my job and work experience. But, I don't want to read about my business. I know my business. I am an expert in my business. I want to read other news. I want to choose what I want to read! Search engines, social sites can do their algorithms and then use it to display ads to me and suggest topics they think I want to click on in the sidebar. But they cannot present me with totally curated pages of content they have decided I should read. I will leave as they aren't the only game in town. You can't do that on Linkedin.com they have a captive audience who have to follow their rules if they want to benefit from their service. Their rules have always been crystallized into precise, demanding structure that has worked for Linkedin from day one, but not necessarily for the user. They have been dogmatic and domineering about what kind of profile to fill out and how much information to provide. They demand dates, locations, chronology, and detailed structure. Why? Because then they can better slice, dice, and aggregate the information to sell it to recruiters and hiring entities who have been their main source of income. But now they are moving to a content model to become the one-stop business portal for all their members. True to form, they have decided what you will read and curated the content for you. Oh sure you can pick from their selected list of "influencers" but then that's all that they display to you. The image with this post is my Linkedin Home page today. None of it interests me. The updates that my 7000+ connections post are far more interesting and that's what I read. Just like you are reading this. And my updates to Linkedin come from, ironically, my curated boards on Flipboard or my blog posts. Will somebody tell Linkedin that their members would be stickier on their site if allowed to curate and share the content they choose and not what's chosen for them? And that people would work harder to build great profiles if they had more options, flexibility and control over them?
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