A few days ago, I discussed the importance of continuity – generally as it related to movies and television. But continuity is important in applications, too – perhaps even more so.
Let’s take a look at LinkedIn as one example. For a long time, LinkedIn has offered recommendations, but those are free-form endorsements, and as such they are not as easily searched and indexed, so the company decided to add “skills” to profiles. You can add skills yourself to your profile – as many as 50 individual skills that you believe represent your skill set.
Your contacts can then endorse you for one or more of those skills, saying that you are indeed good at these particular skills, which makes for a simpler way of potential employers or other contacts finding someone with those skills.
If the skill is not already on your profile, or if there is no room to add another one (or someone doesn’t see it), the contact can actually type in a new skill. This is where the problem can be introduced.
The problem is that the skills are case-sensitive. For instance, I may have a skill that is called WordPress (note the uppercase P). However, someone might type in WordPress (note the lowercase p).
What is interesting is that if someone adds “WordPress” (lowercase p) to my profile, it will then have a pop-up balloon that describes “WordPress” (uppercase P). But these skills are actually distinct and separate. I haven’t tried, because I don’t want to cause even more trouble, but it seems that variations such as wordpress and WORDPRESS and even WoRdPrEsS would cause similar issues.
I can certainly understand if it is entered as Word Press, that should be different – though perhaps even the space should be able to be eliminated – but should it really be case sensitive? It seems that the skills themselves (that is, the pages that LinkedIn uses to describe the skills) are not case-sensitive. So if you go here and here, you end up at the same place.
Yet I actually have been endorsed for two separate skills – WordPress and WordPress (as well as others, perhaps, these are just the ones I’ve noticed). Nice. Surely this is something that can be addressed, so i can have the appropriate skill endorsements on my profile.