Affordance Analysis- Linkedin

Affordances:

Linkedin is an amazing tool where you can store your Rolodex or business cards in one area and also share them with others.

Contact Accessibility

A great affordance of having our contacts in one spot is that your contacts are easily accessible and you don't have to be sitting at a desk to thumb through pieces of paper to find a certain contact. Linked in sorts your contacts for you in alphabetical order and shows you all of the contact information that the contact has shared.

Search Features

Linkedin has made things very easy when you are looking to find a certain contact or company. If the company has submitted their information to the site then you can see such things as the size of the company, location, career path, specific employees, where they attended college, and several others. I personally like the area where you can search by school because I can reach out to specific alumni when helping students make contacts.

Groups

You can also make group pages on Linked that can be private and invite only or open to the entire world. This helps with discussions on certain topics so that you don't have to blast it out to all of your contacts.

Jobs

There is a great feature of posting and searching jobs all over the world. You can set specific criteria for your search and it will come up with those listings. This tool is also great for recruiters as it will show specific individuals with a certain skill set that you are looking for.

Network Statistics

This breaks down your contacts or networks and shows you how connected you are by one or two clicks all around the world. This also breaks down the regions and industries that your contacts are from.

Disaffordances:

Display

The look of the Linkedin website still seems very corporate, as it should, but it is not pleasing or will not catch your eye when looking at great, creative websites. I think if they were to add more video features then it would help.

Connections to other sites

Although it is great to connect with Twitter and Facebook, I am hoping that in the future it will have better connections with Excel or Google Docs so that you can generate a list of names or companies and cross reference them with your contacts on Linkedin.

Cost

The basic account that most people use is great but if you want to step up to a Business Plan or Executive then you have to shell out $39.95-$99.95/ month in which I would never pay for this service.


As you can see, there are many more advantages to Linkedin then disadvantages and the shortcomings can be fixed easily and at a minimal cost.