LinkedIn Rolls Out Enhanced Groups Features; Facebook adds Live Feed

Ed: Myspace, Facebook, and LinkedIn have taken dramatically different approaches to social networking, communications.

• Myspace is a free-for-all with their founding as social circles for groupies to touch their favorite musicians. Unfortunately, this has expanded to include hookers and other undesirable audiences. 
• Facebook started with the top universities. Although, they have lost universities like Stanford, users prefer them over the new Affinity Circle. Facebook has grown to attract high school students and boomers. International growth makes them number one. The networking feature is primarily wall posts (quick comments) on news feed items like photos, videos, or status reports (i.e. what am I doing now) Today, Facebook released Live Feed, a tab from the home page that shows real changes without clicking. Cool.
• LinkedIn has cleaned up their cluttered interface and added the discussion boards for groups. They recently opened groups for any user; and now adds the discussion board as a group feature. Structurally, it is similar to the question, answer feature. It is integrated into the newsfeed like feature on the home page. On it's first day, the discussions have been immediately popular.

The pace of change is astounding. Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo look like slow moving dinosaurs by comparison.

LinkedIn Rolls Out Enhanced Groups Features

Last week, we wrote about LinkedIn’s recent issues with its Groups - as part of a new platform rollout, a number of management features were apparently buggy, while others had been removed entirely.

Tonight sees the release of a number of new features on the platform that should quell some of these concerns. Among the new features are a centralized hub page for every group, where group members can come together and converse with each other in one place. The release also introduces enhanced group and user management features, including a searchable roster.

While it’s nice to see LinkedIn enhancing its groups functionality, its surprising to see that the company has taken this long to introduce them - most of them seem to be fairly basic. That said, the added community features should be a boon to the site’s professional user base as they look to enhance their connections with their peers.