Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments. The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it's less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company's mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you're looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post . Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it's a work in progress and will improve soon. Sponsor What's The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs! For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase "contact X has updated their profile." They have? How did they update it? It's maddening. LinkedIn says it's working on solving this problem, but it doesn't seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn's strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world - not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages. Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary Perhaps LinkedIn isn't to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts' info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you've got someone's name and phone number on your phone already - it's a headache to pull in a person's LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually. Of course your phone number isn't an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you're unable to call. You won't even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone's contact list - peoples' LinkedIn profile page URLs aren't included in the contact info that gets imported. There's No Push Notifications This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone - shouldn't it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example - you know they'd like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too. Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she's founded a new company called Shwowp . I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don't know about it until a month later because I didn't want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara's news and I didn't want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland "Tara Hunt has updated her profile" in order to see if she's happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page. When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn't seem like too much to ask and that's when I'll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life. Update: LinkedIn's Adam Nash, author of the company's announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: "we've discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue...Rest assured, we wouldn't have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn't have big plans for it. " Discuss

Go here to read the rest:
LinkedIn's New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It

Facebook has just added a new photo uploader tool to their Prototypes directory, the "labs" section of the social network where new programs are released for testing prior to their public rollout. The uploader dramatically improves one what was previously one of the worst experiences on Facebook: adding photos. Despite the fact that Facebook hosts over 80 billion photos and adds around 2 billion more each month, the process of adding new photos to your profile was cumbersome, slow, and buggy. Even Facebook itself admitted there were problems saying that most users found the tool "functional, but only just." They also discovered that a significant percentage of users couldn't even upload photos due to technical issues. Because of these complaints, the company finally decided it was time to revamp their uploader for good. Sponsor Believe it or not, the Facebook photo uploader hasn't changed since its introduction in 2005. As it did then, the current tool still relies on a third-party ActiveX control and Java Applet. For users, this meant a photo-uploading experience that felt just as old as it was. When thinking as to how the new uploader should function, Facebook had a few goals, most of them technical in nature. They wanted the new tool to no longer depend on Java, be compatible with future versions of Facebook's chrome, be easy to update, and more. However, to the end user, the best part about the new uploader is that it allows you to start a photo upload and then leave the page to browse around elsewhere on Facebook (or even the web!) while the upload is underway. To meet their goals, Facebook went with a browser plug-in that uses JavaScript APIs and a front-end created with HTML and CSS. The end result is a much improved experience. But like the Facebook blog post says, "while it looks like magic, it's really just a bunch of cool hacks." Hacks or not, regular Facebook users will greatly appreciate the upgrade. Install the New Photo Uploader Tool To install the new uploader, you must first visit the Prototypes page for the tool and activate it for your profile. Then, the next time you go to create a new album, you'll be prompted to install the Facebook plug-in. Once complete, you'll be presented with the new user interface which lets you browse through your computer's photo library and select the images you want to upload. This new interface is much easier to navigate - and more attractive, too - than the old Facebook uploader from days past. Facebook says the new tool has several additional security mechanisms built in as well, one of the more interesting being a "kill switch" that can remotely deactivate the tool in the event that a security hole is discovered. While confident that the new uploader is already securely designed and architected from the start, the company has released it as a prototype first so people can report any security issues they may find. Less technically-minded folks can simply activate the tool and use it, reporting any problems they find as well as far as user experience issues, crashes, or other bugs. Depending on the results of the tests, Facebook will be able to correct any problems prior to rolling it out to all users. If you want to give the new uploader a shot yourself, you can do so by visiting its page here . Discuss

More here:
At Last! Facebook Improves Photo Uploading Experience

After a predefined period designed to increase transparency and maximize user feedback, Facebook has announced that, with fewer than 7,000 user comments, it will proceed to implement its proposed amended privacy policy . With adequate user information, Facebook hoped to become better stewards of "the unnaturally uncontrollable nature of communication," as we called their general user-data privacy dilemma in June. And this revision also makes a nod to Canadian objections to Facebook's policies. What's in store for users, and how did the thousands of units of user data impact Facebook's governance and privacy policy? Read on to get the full story. Sponsor The latest revision of the policy can be found here , and the current policy is available here . According to the site's governance, fewer than seven thousand user comments, the revised policy will be shortly enacted and will be official. "While a lot of people participated," wrote IP counsel Michael Richter, "the total number of people commenting did not reach the threshold of 7,000 that makes a vote necessary according to our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. Because of this - and the fact that many of the comments were positive - we've decided to adopt the revised policy." The new method of determining policies based on user feedback stems from the site's desire to foster a culture of transparency and engagement. Here are the old policy and revised policy changes, which, again, will be enacted shortly: Old: When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information... Even after removal, copies of User Content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other Users have copied or stored your User Content... Access and control over most personal information on Facebook is readily available through the profile editing tools. Facebook users may modify or delete any of their profile information at any time by logging into their account. Information will be updated immediately. Individuals who wish to deactivate their Facebook account may do so on the My Account page. Removed information may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time but will not be generally available to members of Facebook. New: Viewing and editing your profile. You may change or delete your profile information at any time by going to your profile page and clicking "Edit My Profile." Information will be updated immediately. While you cannot delete your date of birth, you can use the setting on the info tab of your profile information page to hide all or part of it from other users... Deactivating or deleting your account. If you want to stop using your account you may deactivate it or delete it. When you deactivate an account, no user will be able to see it, but it will not be deleted. We save your profile information (friends, photos, interests, etc.) in case you later decide to reactivate your account. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and in doing so are asking us to maintain their information until they return to Facebook. You will still have the ability to reactivate your account and restore your profile in its entirety. When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted. You should only delete your account if you are certain you never want to reactivate it. You may deactivate your account on your account settings page or delete your account on this help page. Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Facebook. (For example, if you post something to another user's profile, and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an "Anonymous Facebook User.") Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested. Future updates will be announced via the site's governance page . Discuss

View original post here:
Facebook Adopts New Privacy Policy