Author Archives: Matt Kapko

Linked hasn’t slowed its momentum under the ownership of Microsoft. The professional social network surpassed 500 million registered users this week, up from 467 million members as of October 2016.

The company’s growth rate has remained steady during the past year, including a quiet period after Microsoft announced plans to acquire the business last June. The $26.2 billion deal closed in late December.

LinkedIn hit the 500 million mark during a remarkably busy stretch of updates including the site’s most significant redesign to date, improvements to its premium subscription plans, messaging and the introduction of a trending storylines feed. Much of the focus of late is on improving the user experience and creating mechanisms to increase engagement among users.

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Facebook today announced that more than 14,000 organizations are using Workplace, the company’s social network for business. Workplace launched six months ago with an initial group of 1,000 companies that tested the platform during a 20-month pilot period. The company also announced a series of new integrations with third-party vendors, a new API for video production and streaming, and the introduction of bots to Groups and the Work Chat app.

[ Related: First CIO on Workplace by Facebook talks collaboration in the enterprise ]

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Facebook is introducing a free version of Workplace, the company’s social network for business, in a bid to appeal to smaller and more cost-sensitive organizations that don’t necessarily need enterprise-class services. Workplace Standard, which will initially be offered as a beta, won’t include administrative controls, some security compliance measures, monitoring tools, single sign-on or integration with third-party services, according to Facebook.

[ Related: First CIO on Workplace by Facebook talks collaboration in the enterprise ]

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Snap, the makers of Snapchat, has faced at least some of the pressures that come with being a publicly traded company for a full month now and it’s already showing signs of change. On Friday, the company enabled a new search function that allows you to search through public posts, or Stories. In its pursuit of more eyeballs and longer sessions in the app, Snap is evolving and embracing features that run counter to its traditional user experience and more closely mirror those of its competitors.

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Within the span of five weeks, Facebook has copied a format pioneered by Snapchat and introduced it to all three of its most widely used apps: WhatsApp, Messenger and the primary Facebook mobile app. “Stories,” a tool that lets you share photos and videos in a feed that “disappears” after 24 hours, came to Instagram in August and started rolling out to Facebook proper this week. With short-lived media promoted and featured prominently across the company’s entire family of mobile apps, the Snapification of Facebook is now complete.

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CIOs and IT managers are increasingly adopting Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite for collaboration, productivity and messaging. These cloud-based productivity suites are expanding, gaining new feature sets and new apps for enterprise users. Earlier this month, both Google and Microsoft introduced chat-based collaboration apps to reposition for competition in this fast evolving and hotly contested space.

Microsoft’s Teams, which has been in beta since November, was released for general availability for Office 365 customers. And Google introduced a rebuilt Hangouts, which has been split into two apps — Hangouts Chat for chat-based communications and Hangouts Meet for audio and video conferencing.

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LinkedIn is taking a more forceful approach to news curation. The company today is releasing a “trending storylines” feed that lives alongside your personally curated feeds to showcase news articles and related posts personalized based on your interests and profession.

The experience is like the trending topics Facebook surfaces for its users. The trending storylines are determined by a mix of algorithms and human curation from LinkedIn’s editorial team. When you are in the trending storylines tab, you can also follow new people and topics to improve your primary feed.

LinkedIn