I feel in the urge of commercializing it, the builders have forgotten or wondered away from its primary goal.
So, thinking about what its goal could be
(1) Connecting professionals of same interest - to some extent it has succeeded but not fully
(2) Help recruiters find authentic talent - it has failed
(3) Help expert employees to build credential portfolio/profile that can be trusted by future employers - It could have done a lot on that front but doesn't seem to be
Some of the feature I personally used and felt frustrated because of its incompleteness:
1) Adding professional contact - for many of us, colleagues are from different companies e.g. client side team working with us on the same project. There is no relevant option to add these contacts which would say "worked together on a project"
2) Polls - Don't know what's wrong; may be many things, but never got it working as I could liked it to be.
3) Status update - why does this site need one? Have you seen a single person posting updates regularly through this feature and telling people what he is working on?
4) Travel Info - What's the point? If you are travelling to a city, what was the site expecting? People would come receive you at the airport? Or schedule a business meeting with you without any prior talks? Or plan something like that? Would you find time, if so?
5) Misused by HR people.
My observation is it tried to do many things without having a clear goal and so haven't succeeded in any of it. I am not measuring 'success' by number of active users but how well it satisfies those users with everything they want to achieve through this platform. Whether it failed or not that's a debatable question; but some focused business goals and then technically making the site 'usable' would help it a lot.
One credit that it should definitely get is trying to do something for which there is a great real-life need and no other better alternatives.
So, thinking about what its goal could be (1) Connecting professionals of same interest - to some extent it has succeeded but not fully (2) Help recruiters find authentic talent - it has failed (3) Help expert employees to build credential portfolio/profile that can be trusted by future employers - It could have done a lot on that front but doesn't seem to be
Some of the feature I personally used and felt frustrated because of its incompleteness: 1) Adding professional contact - for many of us, colleagues are from different companies e.g. client side team working with us on the same project. There is no relevant option to add these contacts which would say "worked together on a project" 2) Polls - Don't know what's wrong; may be many things, but never got it working as I could liked it to be. 3) Status update - why does this site need one? Have you seen a single person posting updates regularly through this feature and telling people what he is working on? 4) Travel Info - What's the point? If you are travelling to a city, what was the site expecting? People would come receive you at the airport? Or schedule a business meeting with you without any prior talks? Or plan something like that? Would you find time, if so? 5) Misused by HR people.
My observation is it tried to do many things without having a clear goal and so haven't succeeded in any of it. I am not measuring 'success' by number of active users but how well it satisfies those users with everything they want to achieve through this platform. Whether it failed or not that's a debatable question; but some focused business goals and then technically making the site 'usable' would help it a lot.
One credit that it should definitely get is trying to do something for which there is a great real-life need and no other better alternatives.