LinkedIn, now what?

Last week I posted about a battle of wit I had with LinkedIn. (I lost.) It seems that when I read “You have 1 invitation remaining,” I assumed that I had 1 invitation remaining. But now that I understand I was wrong, I’m slowly becoming LinkedIn.

But the story doesn’t end there. Now that I’ve added a few connections, it seems there’s really no second step. In other words, I’m not really sure what the site does – there seems to be no compelling, ongoing interaction.

I recognize that once again, I may not be the target of the application. I’m not looking to change jobs, and I’m not hiring senior level execs for a fortune 500 company. I also recognize that if LinkedIn were to be more obvious about its career pathing intentions, it would likely lose a lot of interest from people like me.

So, instead of giving up on the site, I’m going to make some blanket suggestions to make LinkedIn better and then await anxiously for their implementation.

1. Encourage users to pull in a Flickr photostreams, link to videos. This would get people posting about conferences, etc. “Getting back in touch” also feels a lot more like getting back in touch when photos are available.

2. Add a calendar system that encourages users to update conferences/meetups they’re participating in, attending or interested in. Allow users to mark these as public private or available to connections and provide RSS feeds for these dates. Then, if I want to see if any of my connections are hitting the next BarCamp, all I have to do is check my reader.

3. Add a “current projects” posting area that encourages ongoing updates. Currently, there’s no real reason to check in on the profiles of your connections (or your own for that matter.) These updates would change that. It’s important to note that what I did not just suggest there was to add a “journal” or “weblog” or anything remotely resembling a blog.

That’s it. Three steps to a LinkedIn that does something. With the recent 4.7M investment led by Sequoia Capital, they should have the development budget to take care of it.