LinkedIn today is presenting an update on its mobile strategy, and as part of that, its parted the curtain a bit to show us how its planning to integrate Pulse into its platform. (Pulse, if you recall, was acquired for some $90 million in April of this year.) Ankit Gupta, Pulse’s co-founder said it would become the “content brand” for LinkedIn. As part of that, the app will start to offer users the ability for people to log in with their LinkedIn identities to receive recommended stories, and it will start to incorporate content from influencers.
The idea is that Pulse will be not just a place to read news, but a place for people to read news tailored to their professional lives. “We will be bringing better content experiences to empower users throughout their day and their careers,” he said. The app will be released later this year, Gupta said.
The idea of a single sign on and a user’s identity that will be used outside of LinkedIn’s own platform is an interesting one: it’s also something that LinkedIn’s acquisition of Rapportive is exploring with its new intro service.
LinkedIn today also announced a new a new iPad app that it says underscores its new approach to mobile with an updated feed with more visual images and video, as well incorporating its rebuilt search engine, introduced earlier this year on the desktop.
The company said that some 38% of all traffic is on mobile, and next year LinkedIn’s CEO Jeff Weiner said today that LinkedIn will cross its “mobile moment,” where mobile traffic will surpass that of desktop traffic.
The company has been on personalization tear over the last year, with improved search, more features in its mobile apps — including the ability to upload and edit resumes and apply for jobs, and a separate app to manage contacts — and updates of its user home page, LinkedIn Today, to include curated content (a place where we can expect more to come from its Pulse acquisition). The idea will be to ensnare all verticals as it goes on. One of these, to target universities in an effort started in August, now already has some 1,500 universities on board, Weiner said.
This is done with what the company says is a hands-off approach, with echoes of Google in its description of its philosophy on search than Facebook or Apple and their ecosystems. “We’d like there to be a professional profile for every one of the 3 billion-plus professional people in the world today,” said Weiner, “and then we’d like to step away.” He and LinkedIn see this as a potential economic boost.
“How is mobile allowing us to reinvent LinkedIn?” Weiner asked today. “The expectations of our users today is that those applications are going to continue to evolve… We can’t just take the desktop experience and port it over to mobile.” This includes taking into account screensize as well as user expectations and the need for users to find information faster.
During the presentation today Deep Nicer, SVP of Products and User Experience, admitted some of what LinkedIn learned along the way: from launching its first iPhone app in 2010, it thought it had everything sewn up. “Ten months later we had to completely rewrite it,” he said. And then it had to do it again, and again. That’s including needing to continue to staff and train existing staff to think and act mobile-first. That has included not just coding at the back end, but in terms of rethinking design.
“The magic of mobile is keeping simple simple. I have a five-second rule,” noted Kiran Prasad, Senior Director, Mobile Engineering. He noted that there is no way of putting the 500-odd distinct pages that LinkedIn offers on desktop into its mobile app. It’s a step away from trying to achieve parity in a single site, and a move towards a multiple-app strategy.
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