Note: This information is now out of date.
Until a couple of weeks ago the only way to turn off your “activity broadcast” was to go to your settings page (which usually involves entering your password again) and then clicking on “Turn on/off your activity broadcasts.” It was easy to forget to turn off or to turn back on again when you wanted to broadcast. The feature is still available on the settings page but now you have another option.
Now you can easily choose to not notify your network about updates when you’re right on the edit profile page.
Your choices look like this:
If you leave your activity broadcast on, every time you make a number of changes, it will update your entire network. Besides being annoying spam to your connections, it’s often embarrassing – perhaps you made an adjustment to your job title – nothing new, just a correction or refinement and now your entire network receives an announcement that you have a “new job” (when you’ve been there 5 years) and suggest they congratulate you. While it’s great to have people reach out to you, it’s also often awkward. Now when you make a change, you have no excuse to forget to turn your activity broadcast off as appropriate.
The opposite is also true. If you forget to turn your activity broadcast back on, you’ll miss some great opportunities to bring attention to your profile and activities. Perhaps you’ve make some additions to your profile – a new job, a blog post, a great link and you’re wondering why you don’t hear from anyone or why the number of views of your profile hasn’t increased. Now it’s easy to check that your activity broadcast is turned back on.