Professional social networking website Linkedin launched its Linkedin Groups application last August. This application allows user to start a forum or discussion on any subject, professional or otherwise and then actively participate by commenting or sharing information. The number of groups has hugely grown to more than 7,50,000 as of this day.
Now, in June this year they enabled the users to like, follow any discussion along with many other things. The website, which has a membership of more than 85 million users, is making groups available for general public. This means that Linkedin members can search and view the discussions on these public groups although they are not a member of that group. Further, members can now link other friends from Facebook and twitter on to some of these groups to share discussions.
Privacy issue has been taken good care of by enabling a feature by which lets the members of an open group know that they are now publicly visible and all discussions happening henceforth will be read publicly. Not only this, group members don’t need to worry about discussions happened in the past as they will be left open only for members.
The Groups feature has taken Linkedin past to just being a place to network for professionals by making it available and open to a larger audience. Although it may give Linkedin a just-another-social network kind of feel, opening the site for more conversations than just professional ones makes it only more interesting.