Further Thoughts on Facebook and LinkedIn
Recently, I’ve written some initial impressions about the new endorsement feature on LinkedIn, and the new Interest List feature on Facebook. Since I’ve actually had a chance to take a look at how they operate, I wanted to share a few more thoughts.
First, LinkedIn. I saw where someone had endorsed one of my skills, and when I looked at my profile, I noticed that I could see a link to their profile, which obviously provides a way to have your profile show up for folks who happen to be looking at someone you’ve endorsed. Given that, I think it might be a useful way to highlight yourself within your network in a new way. It also runs a risk of someone trying to be spammy as well, so I’ll be on the lookout for that, though I believe you can only endorse people you are already connected with.
The other thing I noticed is that in the alerts section of my profile, on the right hand side of the screen, under where it showed that someone had endorsed me, there was a link to “Endorse Your Connections”, which popped open a window with 4 random contacts and one skills for each, asking me to endorse them, along with a link to load more. That’s not a bad way to endorse a bunch of folks without having to navigate to each of their profiles.
The one down side to endorsing that I noticed, at least for me, is that I do only want to be seen as endorsing folks I really know are experts and what they are claiming to be expert at on their profile. Unfortunately, in some case, that might require me to actually know more about that skill than I currently do. For example, I have a large number of attorneys that I’ve worked with as connections on LinkedIn. Working with them was great, and I got along with them really well and I generally felt like they . On LinkedIn, though, I’m being asked whether they are good at legal research, for example. I have no idea if they are or not, because I don’t know much about legal research! So all you attorneys out there, sorry for not really being able to endorse you, even when I do think you’re good at your job! 😉
Secondly, Facebook’s Interest Lists. I only noticed this when someone pointed out that you had the option to add a page to your interest list when you moused over the “Like” button, but now I see that’s it’s actually a much larger feature than that. Go to a page and add it to a new interest list, if you want to see what I’m talking about. When you create a new list, it will prompt you to go through your friends, your subscriptions and the pages you like and add them to the list. You can also browse pages by subject or search for other pages to add to your list. Then you can actually choose whether to share your lists, making them public, sharing only with friends, and keeping them private. In this way, they sort of become like Twitter lists, or yes, Google Plus Circles. Yeah, it’s not original, but give Facebook credit for implementing features that are popular with other social networks, and make their own more useful. I created a small, private, list for myself, but am thinking about creating a public one and sharing it.
Have any of you created a public interest list you want to share? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to see some good examples of interest lists while I contemplate creating one or two of my own. You know, when I have some extra time. 😉
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I haven’t used the interest lists yet. I already had lists set up for my friends from a couple of years ago. I’m wondering if these work the same way those lists do.
When you add things to the interests lists, do they show up in your newsfeed along with all your other things, or do you just look at each list on its own?
The interest lists show up along the left hand side, so they don’t change your main newsfeed but become a way to show just the updates from whatever you added to that list.
I’m not sure, however, if you add a page to an interest list that you don’t already like, if it automatically likes that page for you or not. I’m sort of assuming it does, but I do wonder if you subscribe to someone else’s list if you would just see a feed for those pages without having it show that you liked it.