LinkedIn's Challenge During Rapid Growth: Balancing Good, Bad, and Ignorant

Reid Hoffman Has Been Working Behind The Scene
To Make LinkedIn IPO a Success

As you might have heard, LinkedIn is moving in full speed ahead to go public. With added PR surrounding first social network site to file for IPO, the professional social networking site has been steadily picking up new users along the way. Last time I wrote about LinkedIn back in early October 2010, user base was around 80 million. Now there are reports suggesting that user base has climbed to 90 million as of early January 2011.

All these growth means good thing for both LinkedIn users and those who earn paycheck thinking about how to harness the power of social networking sites. But I am a little circumspect in accepting the rapid growth as all good news.

Here's why:

Best UI Is One That Attracts User Then Gets Out Of User's Way

These days one design trend that I hear often is minimalism. In my book, this translates to putting the absolute minimum design elements while providing functional software. Minimalism is a good guideline for designer to force themselves to think carefully about each design element. If something is not absolutely needed, then chances are it will do more harm than good to overall product usability.

That's because great product UI/UX should do following:


1. It should make target users want to use the product
2. Once the users get their hands on, it should disappear in the background

It's Not About Content; It's All About Communication

Google is all about content; Facebook is all about communication.

- Kailash Ambwani CEO of FaceTime Communications

Today I want to share a few articles that I found over last month or so. All these articles talk about non-intuitive observation. They all point to importance of communication, and how enabling communication is really the key to harness the explosive network effect of social network. Contrary to popular belief, they all talk about content, as we know them, is not the king.

Tips From Three CEOs: Obsess Over Customers To Make Fans Out Of Them

While I was taking a deeper dive from tweets that landed on my Flipboard, I came to discover three separate interviews with CEOs who recently have made headlines. To my surprise -- maybe it's not too surprising if you think about the final message -- I found a clear theme across these interviews: Obsess over customers to make fans out of them.

This lesson has been repeated so many times that it has almost become a cliche. But I think it's a lesson that we should hold close to our heart when we are building a company or service. We have to constantly think about how to improve the customer satisfaction, and turn the customers into advocates so that they can be viral marketing agents working for you.

For anyone who's aspiring to launch a service or create a company, these interviews are must watch.

What Would 2011 Have For Us?

After 3 week long hiatus I'm about to restart my blogging. During the break I visited India and South Korea for about ten days each, and was reminded that how much I grew addicted to constant Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates. The moment I regained my free wifi connection at Seoul International Airport, I was back at catching up all the news bits from my social media curators.

One theme that I noticed from all tweets and articles was the year 2011 prediction. Whether Facebook will go IPO or not, whether Google will successfully launch its social network site or not, what the next Groupon or Zynga will be in year 2011, and such. After reading a few of them, I realized I had a few overarching trends that I saw from my perspective. I wanted to outline a few notable trends that I anticipate in year 2011.

Simplify User Experience: Make It Physical

These days I spent most of my time thinking about user experience. I see increasing importance of getting the user experience right. As I discussed on my earlier post, I believe that good user experience is human-computer interaction designed to be so intuitive that almost invisible to the users.

I Had To Struggle With This Perfectly Functional
In-Flight Entertainment UI Built Pre-iPhone

If you are international traveler, you are now accustomed to seeing personal in-flight entertainment system. I just had a pleasure of sitting in front of one for 14 and half hours. When you are stuck on a plane for that long, perhaps it is expected that you'll learn how to navigate through different screens with controller.

Before touchscreen user interface, interacting with controller looked perfectly normal thing to do. If you want to move the cursor around, you use four arrow keys. If you want to select something, you first highlight it then press enter. That's how we've been interacting with computer, Nintendo, XBox, and Playstation. Things were perfect. Until iPhone came out, that was.

Get Federated Or Get Obliterated

About 15 years ago I was happy with my desktop applications installed. Computer was a glorified calculator, typewriter, and video game machine back then. When I powered up my desktop, I was either going to write quick proof-of-concept Pascal code, type up school reports, or play Doom. All executables and contents that I used was installed on my hard drive. Whenever I wanted to talk to friends, I picked up the landline phone and called. Whenever I needed references checked, I headed out to library.

These days computer has turned into all-in-one communication device. When I open my laptop, I immediately open my browser, check out the latest tech news on Twitter, read what my friends are up to on Facebook, and respond to emails. No longer I have to pick up the phone or drive. I just open my IM client to chat with my friends, or use Google to look up any fleeting question that I may have at any moment. I cannot possibly imagine using a computer without network connection. Computer without internet connection is as good as dead weight.

In this post, I would like to make a case that this increasing connectivity is not a trend isolated to computer networks, but applies to social networks as well. Urge to share things and get connected has deeper roots in our human nature. It is something that cannot be ignored, and must be harnessed to make the leap into next stage of networking.