I received the following email today, which is in reference to the Code4Lib group on LinkedIn:

First of all, thank you for your management of your group on LinkedIn.

In the past few weeks, we've made some changes with Groups. We introduced a new searchable directory in July, and last Thursday, we made some changes to the group management tools.

Both releases were part of a major change for Groups that we have been planning for several months. We've been talking to both group owners and members and looking at the great groups you have already built. I think we all see great potential for what Groups could be.

But in order to get there, we had to move to a new Groups platform. There was simply no way we could provide the tools you need to serve your members (and ours) with the old system. We made that switch last Thursday.

Some of you wrote in immediately to let us know about problems you encountered after the switch. Thank you for letting us know. I'm happy to say we have some of the problems fixed, but we still have several left to go. We know that these are serious issues and ask for your patience as we work through them.

Here's what we're doing:

  • This week: Showing email addresses on the requests to join list in the management tool so you can verify where members are coming from and easily send them a welcome message.
  • Next week: Increasing the number of members shown in the management tool from 100 to 1,000 and increasing the number of members per page from 20 to 50; adding email addresses to the members list; adding date field to the CSV export feature; adding CSV export feature to requests to join list; increasing the CSV export limit from 10,000 to 50,000.
  • Also next week: We'll enable home pages for group members and some other group collaboration features.
  • In the weeks following: Sorting by date and name, and expansion to longer member lists, search by email address, and additional management capabilities throughout the rest of 2008.

We're looking forward to the future of LinkedIn Groups and would like you to help shape the direction. I've asked two questions on LinkedIn Answers. Please contribute as I am looking forward to your feedback.

Sincerely,
Ben Guthrie
Product Manager, LinkedIn