LinkedIn announces second groups update, a successful one this time?

LinkedIn has a weird history with groups. They’re popular, that’s for sure. When the professional network launched a group directory, groups even became too popular – forcing LinkedIn to introduce a maximum of 50 group memberships per person. But their last update from five days ago was so buggy that quite a lot of the group’s functionality disappeared. A look at the GetSatisfaction LinkedIn Groups thread says enough. Complaints about a lack of search options and list styles flooded the support forum.

LinkedIn immediately promised to fix these bugs. Well, we can offer you a time schedule now, based on an email my co-editor Boris received.

First, thank you for managing your group on LinkedIn. We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you devote to your members, and we know they value it. Together you have made Groups one of the top features on LinkedIn.

This Friday, we will be adding several much-requested features to your group:

• Discussion forums: Simple discussion spaces for you and your members. (You can turn discussions off in your management control panel if you like.)
• Enhanced roster: Searchable list of group members.
• Digest emails: Daily or weekly digests of new discussion topics which your members may choose to receive. (We will be turning digests on for all current group members soon, and prompting them to set to their own preference.)
• Group home page: A private space for your members on LinkedIn.

We’re confident that these new features will spur communication, promote collaboration, and make your group more valuable to you and your members. We hope you can come by LinkedIn on Friday morning to check out the new functionality and get a group discussion going by posting a welcome message.

Note the humble start of the email. LinkedIn obviously senses that it has to make it up with its dear Group leaders.

The new features will give the groups the potential of becoming lively communities with a lot of email traffic going on. This will filter some group members out, as they’ll consider these messages to be spam when the subject of the group isn’t relevant enough to them. Let’s see how the LinkedIn community will respond to this new, hopefully more successful, update.

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