Linkedin Today: Customizability Would be Even Better

So Linkedin has provided what I’ve wanted Facebook to do, ie allow me to access News of interest to me in a separate tab. I am a news junkie and I find this feature pretty useful for the following reasons:

• It helps me be well informed about my areas of interest without having to visit many sources individually. Most of the major tech news portals that I visit are represented in one place.
• I have discovered interesting news sources that I previously did not access.
• I can share news articles of interest with contacts and comment on them. This is another opportunity to ‘interact’ with my contacts. I use this feature in tandem with Twitter and it works pretty well.

 

From Linkedin’s perspective, this feature incentivizes users to visit more, spend more time and engage actively. I find that I spend a lot more time now because of Linkedin Today than I did before.

How Linkedin can make this a more useful feature:

• I would like to see more customizability and be able to choose my own news sources in addition to the ones Linkedin generates for me. There are other new sources and blogs pertaining to my industry that I have bookmarked in my Google Reader and regularly access but these are not available on Linkedin Today. For example, I can access Techcrunch, Gigaom and Venturebeat amongst a host of others via Linkedin Today. But I also regularly view PPC Hero and Search Engine Watch, which do not show up on my Linkedin Today page.

Bottomline: Linkedin Today helps me discover new news sources, but it also should let me add sites of interest to me so that I have a single source for business and industry news.

• I would also like to distill content shared by specific contacts or groups of contacts. I may weight or respect certain contacts more than others and consider them thought leaders. In such cases, I’d like the news articles they are reading or recommending to be displayed more prominently.
•  This is totally unrealistic, but I’ll say it anyway. Most people spend at least 30 minutes on their daily morning commute to work. Wouldn’t be awesome to be fully informed of the news in one’s industry on my commute? So if there were a way to transcribe the written content into audio, then a lot of people could connect their cell phones to a car speaker and get their morning news on the way to work and be upto speed on business news. Just sayin’.