LinkedIn spent most of 2012 introducing new products and features, but 2013 is starting with news that one of them is going away.
In an email to members, the company says it’s going to close down LinkedIn Answers as of January 31st.
The Q&A section of the site apparently wasn’t driving user engagement, and the email sent to members says LinkedIn plans to focus on “more engaging ways to share” across the site:
“… we evaluated how our current products and features are being used. To ensure we focus on building the best products, we’ll be retiring LinkedIn Answers on January 31 and it’ll be removed from our site. Instead, we’re focusing our efforts on developing new and more engaging ways to share and discuss professional topics across LinkedIn. We look forward to sharing the details with you in the coming months, so please stay tuned.
To some degree, Answers is repetitive of other features on LinkedIn. As the email points out, there’s already a lot of question asking and answering in Groups (like our Marketing Land group and Search Engine Land group). Polls and standard status updates also allow Q&A to happen on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has mostly been in expansion mode in recent mode, adding new features and improving existing ones. (See the “Related Entries” below for our coverage of those LinkedIn developments.) A week ago, the company announced that it surpassed 200 million members.
Comments