LinkedIn Events launched in 2008 as a way for professionals to find events and conferences that match their career interests. Today, LinkedIn is improving events with intelligent updates to recommendations, search and more.
One of the first changes is that any notifications about events in your network will now appear in your Network Update stream. And your Events home page will provide an evolving set of intelligent event recommendations based on your location, industry, network, and more.
LinkedIn tells me that the Events backend algorithm has been completely redone, and is more “powerful and scalable.” For users, this means that the recommendations will be significantly more relevant. LinkedIn now puts a higher weight on events that your connections are organizing or attending and looks for people who are similar to you and will recommend to you the events that they’re going to.
One interesting new feature is recommendations of “Attendees You May Want To Meet” at particular events. LinkedIn will highlight new connections that you may want an introduction to that match your career and network interests. A Similar Events feature, which creates a browse map for users to find events that are similar to ones that they have identified.
The search function for events upgraded, allowing users to filter by industry, location, and time. Events will display search results with a number of filters at the same time (i.e. you can search for SEO events in London). You can also see events in various locations in the same search.
LinkedIn says that the Events is actually used by a fair amount of its members. The professional social network has tracked over a million RSVPs to hundreds of thousands of professional events on LinkedIn Events in this year alone.
LinkedIn, which just reported third quarter results, recently debuted Classmates, a tool to give users new insights and networking features to connect with fellow alumni of colleges and universities.
