LinkedIn adds Applications for Collaboration and Content Sharing – Will privacy controls keep pace?

LinkedIn has expanded the capability of their social network by adding collaborative features in the form of nine applications, such as sharing power-point presentations and your blog with one’s colleagues. This is a fantastic expansion and will allow for a richer collaborative experience with business contacts and colleagues, but…

As users we will need tighter and more flexible privacy controls. LinkedIn cannot afford to follow Facebook’s path, which was to expand communicative and collaborative features before the necessary flexibility of privacy settings was in place. Since that time, Facebook has set industry standards with regard to detailed and useful privacy controls–they deserve credit for that.

As LinkedIn rolls out these new features, what will they do to expand controls for grouping one’s contacts, especially insofar as each contact can see one’s particular usage of an application? How will they create finer gradations of privacy within the applications?

For instance, do you want all your vacations and travels highlighted for all of your business contacts to see, or just some of them? More importantly, how easy will this be for the user? Many users have been mixing business with social contacts for some time now on Facebook and other OSNs, but have remained disciplined in their usage of LinkedIn. These new LinkedIn features, along with expanded LinkedIn Group capabilities, provide an opportunity to rethink that process.

It’s important that the controls keep pace with what will undoubtedly be rapid expansion of the sharing of personal information with one’s business contacts. While this collaboration can be wildly productive and transformative, we know it produces sharply unintended results. See Brian Solis’s discussion of Bono and Facebook as a reminder of the–perhaps unintended–power of the social web.

Jeremiah Owyang recently discussed LinkedIn’s bright future, especially the fact that they have secured significant funding, hence securing their ability to “go shopping” for collaborative technologies that can add features quickly to the service. Great! I agree with Owyang’s insightful conclusions; he expects LinkedIn to “offer more collaboration between colleagues and connections to happen outside of the firewall where IT doesn’t have control.” If LinkedIn learns from the past mistakes of online social networks, thereby providing detailed privacy controls as these new features are launched–not after–then we can spend more time basking in the creative potential of our newfound collaboration, and less time concerning ourselves with the unintended consequences of one-size-fits-all communication.

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[Here is the original LinkedIn blog post on their adding of Applications that feature Amazon (books), Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart (blogs), SlideShare (multimedia), Tripit, and WordPress (blogs) "...as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn." This is an eventual game-changer for LinkedIn.]