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LinkedIn…remember them? The uber Rolodex with breadcrumb connections?

Historically, we all used LinkedIn to see who is doing what on the long tails of our work world. A polite ‘Let’s connect’ once you meet with people at a conference or on a blog. Not much more.

As a marketing platform, or even a channel for messaging, LinkedIn always stopped way short of useful. This was never the first website I looked at when I started the day.

I decided to take a fresh look after writing a number of posts on Facebook fan pages as a platform for promotions and commerce. The world is changing minute by minute and LinkedIn always had a lot of useful material–(us!)– to build something interesting with.

Two new pluses on LinkedIn:

1. Twitter and Foursquare feeds are there

They are everywhere else of course. Context-creating, real-time wallpaper is something we expect and need now.

2. Subgroups have popped up

I really like these and they have some brand and communications potential. They add more specificity to the discussion platform with big growth numbers in my interest areas.

Kind of search meets information portal meets forums.

I like the groups as a subject-filtering device and in some instances, I’ve made new connections. This has been very true for me in the wine business. Not so within the more dispersed marketing and tech groups.

But with LinkedIn the wish-they-would-do-it list still far outranks the glad-they-did-it list.

Big five (still) missing links for LinkedIn:

1. I can find people but I can’t find community

I belong to 20 or so groups covering social media, social TV, some e-commerce and, of course, the wine groups and subgroups.

The more specific your interest, the better the discussion you can find. Wines from a particular region. Interactive TV widgets. Facebook fan page commerce.

And I’ve met some interesting people posting my blogs or responding to others. But invariably we immediately move the discussion to our personal websites or email or Skype.

It’s like speed networking at the recreation center. Find a match and leave to find a cozier place to talk.

People are the heartbeat of any community. LinkedIn has a lot of people but no clubhouse to foster community.

2. No sense of place

There is ‘no there there’ with LinkedIn.

Unlike Facebook or a blog community, there is just nowhere to hang out. If you are going to have a community, you need to have a place, a page, an ongoing conversation and somewhere to go. Otherwise it’s like a newspaper with headlines to scan. If something is interesting, you jump in, otherwise you leave. It’s disposable communications.

Oddly there is an emphasis on news and discussions, not on people and communications. Without a sense of place there is no community.

3. No conversation platform

Blog and community platforms, especially dynamic ones like Disqus, encourage kinship and conversation.

LinkedIn is about forums and groups, not communities. About exchanges, not conversations. About adding facets of dynamic conversation to a newspaper format, rather than encourage communications and make the comments, the content. This seems like a missed opportunity for them and for us.

Join a conversation string on Fred Wilson’s or Mark Suster’s blog and you will get in an instant what I’m talking about.

4. Closed platform to the open web

Take millions of professional people. Connect them together. Create discussion groups with comments and close this off from Google spiders and open web indexing tools.

Why?

LinkedIn hasn’t learned yet that conversations are content and the key to networking.

That is why bloggers use the discussion groups as free channels, grab readers and move them to more dynamic systems that can be indexed and searched.

5. No video broadcast channels

Education, training and business information seem key to LinkedIn. Why they don’t have channels within the network for shows on job related topics, or interactive video for interviews seems a misstep for them. Moving communications broadcast channels inside of LinkedIn just makes sense.

So…do I find LinkedIn valuable?

Yes..as a database with some clever dynamic components. Design wise though it is socially maladjusted.

Do I  find the discussion groups valuable?

Yes…they are useful filters of information but they stop way short. They are swapmeet-like in structure as there is no community to define the value of the content.

Do I recommend LinkedIn as a marketing platform?

Not really. Nor very useful to build new connections. The communications and community platforms are sparse and archaic.

I’ve always believed that given enough eyeballs you can create a runaway business. Rumor has it that LinkedIn is making money from our eyeballs but seems like an uninspired use of a great resource. And that resource is us.

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