LinkedIn’s Working on Rebuilding Its Groups Experience on the Platform
One week ago, LinkedIn officially announced that the LinkedIn engineering team has decided to rebuild group services on the LinkedIn platform, as well as re-integrating with LinkedIn technology, aiming to enhance groups’ experience and increase groups practical uses. Hence, the LinkedIn engineering team began the project with researching all the technology platforms and services available to users within LinkedIn, as confirmed by LinkedIn.
As a result, LinkedIn found that they have the ability to reuse or enhance existing systems to support Groups. Accordingly, the LinkedIn engineering team brings some unique updates and enhancements to LinkedIn groups’ services, including group backend, concerns, technology upgrades, feed integration, content quality, notifications integration, app consolidation, admin experience on mobile, web experience, and developer productivity.
Groups Backend
LinkedIn explained that in order to to integrate with other platforms on LinkedIn, now, groups team has only the ability to control Groups-specific business logic within those platforms that means that LinkedIn will reduce its operational costs while allowing benefiting from the evolution of those platforms.
Better separation of concerns
One of the LinkedIn enhancements added to its group services is decreasing the number of services owned by the Groups team from nine to three. And two of those three owned services are brand new micro services for Groups metadata and membership. All of this can be done only while the LinkedIn engineering team is creating a cleaner separation of concerns.
Technology upgrades
The LinkedIn engineering team’s decision to rebuild the groups experience also aims to upgrade to the latest LinkedIn technologies. Hence, LinkedIn will move to the latest dependency injection systems and do away with outdated libraries.
It explained, “Our data stores for Groups data are moving from Oracle to Espresso, which has been standardized within LinkedIn. This enables us to scale more effectively.”
Feed integration
Aiming to help groups to catch up with any new features introduced in the LinkedIn feed and never miss any shared content or videos from the members on the feed, LinkedIn is working on this redesign that will enable them to improve the member experience by integrating with the LinkedIn feed’s tech stack. And, this will achieve many benefits, such as:
- Providing the full gamut of feed functionality out of the box and will continue to do so with little or no effort for upcoming features.
- Group members on mobile and web will get to post and consume all of the rich content supported by the main feed.
- Group users can now post videos, post-multi-photo updates, edit their posts, and reply to comments.
- It also will create diversity in the LinkedIn feed.
Enhancing Content quality and preventing spam
The LinkedIn new redesign will also give Groups team more abilities to eliminate spam and low-quality content. Accordingly, Groups is now able to leverage the same spam and low-quality classifiers by using the Universal Content Filtering (UCF) platform.
