You may have heard that LinkedIn recently launched a new service called Signal that is designed to make LinkedIn a more socially relevant application. The service is only available on a very limited basis right now, but will probably roll out to the general LinkedIn population pretty soon.
What is Signal? It’s a simple way of getting real time LinkedIn status updates and Twitter updates delivered in your LinkedIn interface.
Now, this may not seem like any major technical breakthrough – it isn’t – but it does potentially make LinkedIn a much more relevant application in our daily lives.
If you’re like me, you joined LinkedIn because you wanted a simple way to connect online to a community that is more business-oriented than you’d typically find on Facebook, MySpace, or other social networks. LinkedIn has been very successful for this purpose, with tens of millions of active users.
LinkedIn, however, has never really become a part of my daily life, like Twitter and Facebook have. I don’t check in on LinkedIn multiple times each day to see what’s going on with my network. Contrast that to Twitter and Facebook, where I seem to be spending more and more of my time. LinkedIn Signal may change that.
By making LinkedIn a more social application, it may suddenly become very relevant in my workday. It is, after all, the “place” that I keep all of my professional contacts, so it would make sense that I spend time during my workday updating and looking for updates within that network – it just hasn’t really been a feature of LinkedIn to be able to do so.
With the introduction of Signal, LinkedIn collides with my other social applications – it will be interested to see six months from now where I am spending my time online. Will it be spent in LinkedIn ? Lets wait and watch out.
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