LinkedIn Answers Answers

January 10, 2007 - 10:47am — bmann

As I mentioned in my last post on LinkedIn Answers, I posted a meta-question to give feedback:

Suggestions on how LinkedIn Answers should evolve

I've been poking around LinkedIn Answers and am enjoying it so far. As other posts have said -- the offtopic and/or posts that aren't questions need to have a way that members can flag them.
Here's one suggestion on further additions: give me RSS feeds and/or other notification options to subscribe to Answers -- per category, as well as per post, so I can follow up on later answers.

There has been lots of good activity in there, but of course it is up to me as question poser to "close" the question and award the best answer to someone. In another pseudo-question on the use of open source software, I remarked that making these discussios public are of higher value to the "open Internet", and encouraged people to at the very least cross-post to their blogs when they are adding valuable answers.

Scott Allen saw this and posted to his blog, which is dedicated to looking at LinkedIn: LinkedIntelligence - Top Ten Feature Requests for LinkedIn Answers. I think I'll nominate him as the best question answer-er and add to the "green expert stars" he's collecting.

I also wanted to share a snippet of an answer from Betsy Kimak, indicating that LinkedIn Answers is getting a bit addictive...

I'm sure I had things to do...goals and projects...family? Hmmm. Can't seem to remember what they were. Maybe if I pose a question someone will tell me. I'll just look through the list first… Huh, deal-flow generation, what's that? There's really a tube yogurt market? Am I interested in split placement? How do I know? I had better find out what that is… What is it that I do again? Ok, here's the category…What's that one? Oh, I know the answer! Better respond...Wow, is it dark outside already?

My suggestions:

(1) Support group for LinkedIn Answers addicts. Seriously. Sign me up. There's got to be someone here with the credentials, let me just browse through the profiles…

(2) Mechanical Turk-style payment/barter feature. Lots of talent is being given away for free. Besides, we'll need a way to support ourselves after we all lose our jobs and clients. After all, a penny earned…

Thanks for sharing that, Betsy -- made me grin.

Final thought: what about making the LinkedIn Answers portion of the site public? And a widget for displaying my "expert stars"? And cross posting questions/answers to my blog? And...and... :P

Comments

January 13, 2007 - 1:04pm — Scott Allen

LinkedIn Widgets and Mashups

Thanks for the nod, Boris!

Yeah, one of the places LinkedIn seems to be lagging behind somewhat is in opening up an API. The party line is that it's not something that would serve the majority of their customers. The downside, though, is that they get a lot of grief from the digerati and haven't garnered the support in some circles that they could have with an open API.

They've played to the mainstream. That's why they have 9+ million business professionals, though, so it's hard to argue with that.

I think they're going to have to see a "killer app" that would appeal to their mainstream users before they're going to feel the pressure to move on this.