LinkedIn Activity Feed Gone!

UPDATE: It’s back! LinkedIn returned the Activity Feed.

The other day, a friend reached out with a LinkedIn question, “Donna, when I view other people’s LinkedIn profiles, I no longer see their Activity feed anymore, what happened?”

I checked it out on my account and on a bunch of other accounts that I have access to and sure enough, the Activity feed section is gone. The Activity feed sat right below the contact information section and above the Summary area. This was the spot where you could see all the posts and activity for that user.

LinkedIn posted this message in their Help section:

At LinkedIn, we want to provide a great experience for members like you. So from time to time, we take a look at our features to evaluate how they’re being used by our members. Part of this process sometimes means we decide to eliminate a feature, so we can better invest those resources in building new and better LinkedIn products.

Starting in December, you will no longer see your activity feed on your LinkedIn profile, which shows your most recent site activity.

Being able to share what you do on LinkedIn is important to us and we are working on more useful ways for you and other members to view and interact with your activity on LinkedIn from your profile.

I hate to admit this but at first I thought this was a great idea. I never liked the location of the Activity feed on the LinkedIn profile. It pushed the Summary section down too far and it was a bit of a pain having to scroll down to get to the Summary and other sections of the LinkedIn profile.

As much as I didn’t like the position of the Activity feed, once it was removed, I missed it!

You see, removing the Activity feed creates a huge hole. It would be like Facebook removing a user’s Timeline!

LinkedIn is more than just a profile of a professional. Those who get the most benefit from LinkedIn use it as a business tool. It’s not enough to just look at the profile. When you use LinkedIn as a business tool, you also want to know what people are doing on LinkedIn. The Activity feed kept you abreast of all the things a LinkedIn member was doing on LinkedIn. You could see when they updated their profile, added new connections, or posted status messages. Without the Activity feed, who knows what anyone is doing unless you are hanging on the home page watching messages appear real time.

Why would LinkedIn remove such an integral part of their network? I have no idea. My belief is that LinkedIn is working on a different way to show this information.

Okay, So Is There a Workaround to See a LinkedIn User’s Activity Feed?

LinkedIn states on their help page, “Unfortunately, the ability to filter your homepage feed to show only the activity of one member is not possible today.”

Although the Activity feed is gone from LinkedIn’s desktop site, it still exists on their Android App. All you have to do is open up a 1st degree connection’s profile on your mobile phone. Click the area called Recent Activity and from there you will be taken to a page where you can see a list of the recent activity of that LinkedIn connection.

How Can I See My Own Activity Feed?

The good news is you can see YOUR OWN activity feed by simply visiting LinkedIn’s home page. Move your cursor over All Updates, found just above the updates area on your homepage, and select Your Updates. The homepage feed will now only show those updates you have shared with your network.

In Conclusion…

Hopefully LinkedIn is working on another way of presenting a member’s Activity feed. It’s important functionality and it is definitely missed among LinkedIn super users. We shall see what LinkedIn does! My hopes are high that the Activity feed will return in a whole new way soon.

So what do you think? Do you miss the Activity feed? Let me know in the comments.