The vision and goal for LinkedIn is to help you get the job done as easily and quickly as possible. There’s good news for those of you looking for a productivity tool. This week we’ve just released a new version of LinkedIn’s Outlook toolbar. This version adds support for Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista, and has a  number of key bug fixes. If you didn’t see a message to update when you logged into LinkedIn, you
can install it here.

For those of you who don’t know, we provide free toolbars for Outlook and the IE and Firefox browsers. The Outlook toolbar helps you build and maintain your network through a few features. Here’s a feature comparison:

And did I mention that it’s free?

It’s important to note that the Outlook Toolbar adheres to LinkedIn’s privacy policy. Your contacts won’t be uploaded, invited, or experience any additional e-mail due to installing the Outlook Toolbar. We provide the toolbar as a productivity enhancement for you while you use LinkedIn.

So, what’s next for the Outlook Toolbar? We are well into the next release where we plan to make it much easier to quickly build a network with the right people who matter most to your professional career. As always, you’ll have complete control over who is invited to your network. We’ll share designs with you as they are ready.

Click here to download the Outlook toolbar

The past few months saw us reach a few milestones at LinkedIn and we felt that Lunch 2.0 would be a great opportunity to meet a wide cross section of our users who made that possible. Today that wish came true, when we welcomed over 200 professionals from the Bay Area, into our new digs in Mountain View.

The lunch started off promptly at noon with a steady stream of guests arrive and snake their way through our stairway into the cafeteria. Familiar faces in the crowd, included Guy Kawasaki, Rob Hof, Jeremiah
Owyang, Gabe Rivera, Justin Kan, the bub.blicio.us crew, Jeremy Pepper, Shel Israel, Chris Heuer, Daniela Barbosa, Robyn Tippins and many others. Stay tuned for pictures and videos created at the event.

During lunch we recognized the founders of Lunch 2.0, who seem to have inadvertently stumbled upon Silicon Valley’s best kept secret – free lunches! Of course, we gifted them LinkedIn lunch boxes and special commemorative red Swingline staplers, made famous by the movie “Office Space”. We then heard Allen Blue, one of our co-founders, outline LinkedIn’s vision. This seemed all the more appropriate, given our recent string of milestones traversed.

We also injected some fun and games into the atmosphere by setting the stage for two of our favorite office games: 4-square and tennis on the Nintendo Wii! It was great to see many Bay Area professionals having fun in the middle of a busy work-day, play tennis and bowling on the Nintendo Wii console as well as a bunch of others play 4-square in our recently created four-square court.

Thanks to everyone who attended the event for taking time off their busy schedule for some fun, games and lunch. For those of you who missed it, there’s always another Lunch 2.0, with one hosted by Netgear coming up in just a week.

Check out our photo archive for updated images from Lunch 2.0

Quick Update: Here are related blog and media posts on our Lunch 2.0

Lunch 2.0: free food, a side of tech talk cafetaria crashers now invited guests (San Francisco Chronicle)
LinkedIn says lets do Lunch 2.0 (bub.blicio.us video interviews with Guy Kawasaki and CEO Dan Nye)
Lunch 2.0 at LinkedIn was incredible (Web Strategy Blog with video)
When LinkedIn met Lunch 2.0 (Marketing Nirvana)
Lunch 2.0 on Chronicle’s front page (David Kellogg)
Plaxo gets LunchedIn (Plaxo Blog)
Lunch 2.0 in the SF Chronicle today (Mark Jen)
My first Lunch 2.0 event (just another digirati wannabe blog)
Lunch 2.0 at LinkedIn (Adam Nash)
LunchedIn 2.0 – what a party! (Official Lunch 2.0 blog)
Lunch 2.0 has been chronicled (Joseph Smarr)

For those of you who took pictures at the event, please tag them on any public photo sharing site with the following tags: “lunch20″ and “linkedin”

It’s amazing what can happen when the right people connect.  That should sound familiar coming from someone who works at LinkedIn, but we really do believe in the power of a professional network.

A few months ago a handful of LinkedIn employees, inspired by an exchange on our internal blog, came together around the notion that we should really be doing more to leverage our amazing platform for social good.

Today we’re pleased to announce the launch of LinkedIn for Good, an initiative we’ve implemented to virally raise awareness and funds for nonprofit organizations around the world.

LinkedIn for Good allows you to contribute directly to each participating organization from its dedicated page on LinkedIn.  You can also promote the philanthropic causes you care about to others in the network by adding a badge to your profile.

The good connections didn’t end at the initial idea; Grammy-nominated pop star James Blunt agreed to endorse Doctors Without Borders when LinkedIn employee Kay Luo discovered he was raising money for the humanitarian aid organization at a concert.  It just goes to show that when interests are aligned, reaching out to the right people really does pay off.

Check out our launch partners’ pages here:
American Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders
Kiva
Unitus
World Wildlife Fund

In addition to pages and profile badges, we’re giving free job listings to registered nonprofits to help them make key hires.

So put your network to good use – support these outstanding organizations. Also, check out Mashable’s coverage of the LinkedIn for Good launch here.

As far as we’re concerned, a year of profitability is but a “taste” of the success we aspire to achieve at LinkedIn. Nonetheless, our employees, investors, and friends certainly deserve to enjoy such an accomplishment – one to which few dot-com companies can lay claim.

Our normally hard-working yet casual crew cleans up nicely so we decided to bring out the good stuff Saturday night during LinkedIn’s “In the Black” gala at San Francisco’s Ferry Building.

We started things out properly, greeting guests with a sparkling cava reception as they arrived at the grand hall. Eagerly pursuing the “taste of success” theme, we enjoyed several rounds of wine and cheese
– expertly paired by the folks from Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant and Cowgirl Creamery, respectively – followed by an extraordinary spread of Mediterranean-inspired delicacies artfully presented by Amaryll
Schwertner of Boulette’s Larder and Matt Dillon of Sitka & Spruce .

And then. . .

. . .out came the chocolate.

Now, one truffle representing every 10,000 LinkedIn members may not sound like a lot of chocolate, but then you’re talking about a network of over 10 million people, it turns into a veritable Wonka (or in this case, Recchiuti) experience.

The LinkedIn team and our guests didn’t hold back, tearing through the bulk of 1,000 specialty chocolates during the tasting led by Michael and Jacky Recchiuti of Recchiuti Confections. The fleur de sel caramels proved especially popular and a few guests were spotted stuffing their pockets with goodies hastily wrapped in cocktail napkins.

Although the formal celebration wrapped up around 11pm, word has it that the party continued well into the wee hours of the morning as LinkedIners took full advantage of San Francisco’s nightlife.

And deservedly so.

A special thank you to everyone who has contributed to LinkedIn’s success thus far, and we look forward to celebrating many more momentous occasions together in the future!

Dave Sanford — product analyst, resident foodie, and party planner at LinkedIn, organized last weekend’s “In the Black Party” to celebrate our year of profitability.

We’ve recently launched a new feature on user profile pages, which makes it easier to build your network with people you already know.

Here’s how it works:
From a person’s profile page, click on the ‘Add [person's name] to your network’ link.

In most cases, you’ll see a page where you simply need to indicate how you know that person (e.g., colleague, classmate, business partner) in order to send an invitation to connect.

We’ve also redesigned the ‘My Connections‘ page, which will hopefully improve viewing of your LinkedIn connections.

New features include the ability to only show contacts with new
connections, filtering by location and industry, as well as alphabetical
navigation to help you quickly find the specific contact you’re looking for.

If you have less than 500 connections, you’ll be able to scroll through all of your connections. If you have more than that, you’ll just need to click on the alphabetical navigation to view them all. Hope you find the new feature of much use to you. 

We’ve recently launched a new feature on user profile pages, which makes it easier to build your network with people you already know.

Here’s how it works:
From a person’s profile page, click on the ‘Add [person's name] to your network’ link.

In most cases, you’ll see a page where you simply need to indicate how you know that person (e.g., colleague, classmate, business partner) in order to send an invitation to connect.

We’ve also redesigned the ‘My Connections‘ page, which will hopefully improve viewing of your LinkedIn connections.

New features include the ability to only show contacts with new connections, filtering by location and industry, as well as alphabetical navigation to help you quickly find the specific contact you’re looking for.

If you have less than 500 connections, you’ll be able to scroll through all of your connections. If you have more than that, you’ll just need to click on the alphabetical navigation to view them all. Hope you find the new feature of much use to you.

Jory Des Jardins from BlogHer had a great post yesterday on how to avoid bad e-networking, based on a recent experience of hers. The post resonated with me since one of my focus areas is educating our users on how to network effectively.  Here are three things to keep in mind when using LinkedIn:

1. Set your own guidelines: A LinkedIn invitation means “I will potentially help you with my network.” It’s an offer of value, so be judicious about who you extend them to. Here’s my own personal criteria when it comes to sending or accepting invitations: coworkers (since I want all my coworkers to be as successful as possible), friends (ditto), people that I have reciprocal business relationships with (i.e. business partners), people whom I collaborate with as part of my job (in my case, the media), people I’ve worked with and trust, and anyone else who I respect and/or want to help out.  When in doubt, I hit the “Decide Later” button to give the relationship more time to develop.
2. Be thoughtful: Connecting means you’re agreeing to collaborate. It’s a gesture of trust and means that you can now ask me to introduce you to someone I know. This doesn’t mean I will, but it means I will seriously consider it.  A good rule of thumb for making introductions: “Is this a credible opportunity for both people? Will they thank me even if the specific business connection doesn’t happen?”
3. Karma works: Give before you ask and build your network before you need it. The worst time to network is when you need something. If you find ways to help other people achieve their goals the laws of reciprocity will generally work in your favor. People who have zillions of connections and pass along requests indiscriminately don’t understand how to use LinkedIn as a trusted tool. LinkedIn’s designed to help you build upon existing relationships and leverage the trust that you have with these people to reach others.

That’s been my experience thus far. Feel free to share your LinkedIn experience in comments below.

Maybe you’ve wondered in the past who’s been viewing your profile. If so, you’re not alone — it’s been one of our most common feature requests. I’m very happy to announce that we launched a new feature that’ll both tell you how many people have viewed your profile in the past week as well as reveal some interesting characteristics about them.

This was an interesting product for us to design: as the profile owner, we understand you’d like to see exactly who’s viewed your profile, but as a profile viewer, you want your privacy protected. We recently figured out an elegant solution that works for everyone: instead of showing you exactly who’s viewed your profile, we’ll show you some interesting information about the users’ industry or company background without revealing their identity.

When you log in, you may notice on the right hand side of your homepage a box with the number of users who’ve viewed your profile recently. Once you click on it, you’ll see relevant industry and job background details of the users who’ve viewed your profile. Of course, you have control over what is displayed when you view someone’s profile, ranging from not showing any details, to allowing simple anonymous characteristics, like title and industry, to revealing your full name and headline. You can change your settings here.

So if you’re wondering who has viewed your LinkedIn profile, go ahead and check it out. Let us know what you think. Also, if you are interested in building similar cool new products at LinkedIn, check out some of our recent job openings.

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch and TechMeme discuss our newly launched feature.

We double-dipped the Webbys!

The Webby awards (or the “Oscars of the Internet” as they’re more commonly known) were announced last week and we won in the following two categories: social networking and services.

Now for the fun part: as most of you are aware, the Webby awards are famous for their succinct acceptance “speeches”, an institution that has garnered gems such as Al Gore’s “Please don’t recount this vote” to Thomas Friedman’s “The World Really is Flat”.

Of course, we owe this recognition to all our users who’ve continued to support us over the past four years. Since it is the social networking award, we felt it would only be appropriate to let our 10 million users (even those outside of the US), help craft the 5-word speech. And, why not let the user with the best entry, accept the award at the 11th Webby Awards Ceremony (June 5th) in New York City.

Here are the 3-steps to follow:

1. Over the the course of the following two weeks (starting Monday, 5/7/7) users may submit a 5-word acceptance speech for the Webby’s through LinkedIn Answers (submit here). Only one entry per user and private entries allowed.

Submit your 5-word Webby Speech here

2. The following week (starting Monday, 5/21/7) LinkedIn representatives will select a winner from among the entries.

3. The week of May 21st, the finalist will be informed. The winner will then be flown to New York to accept the social networking award and deliver the 5-word speech that he/she crafted. Note: If the winner is unavailable, we’ll pick the next finalist and so on.

So put on your creative thinking caps! What would YOU say if you were at the 11th Webbys in New York, accepting the award for “Best Social Networking Site” on behalf of LinkedIn? And join us in accepting the awards in New York.

Remember, your five words represent more than 10 million of us. This is YOUR LinkedIn Idol. Give it your best shot! Extra points for wit and brevity. And while you’re at it, think of what you’d like to say to some of these pioneers and fellow Webby recipients, when you stumble into them at the celebration zone!

This weekend, LinkedIn celebrates two milestones: first, after outgrowing our current Palo Alto digs, we’re moving to our fifth office (not counting Reid’s living room). We’ll be back in Mountain View, just down the road from the office where we originally launched LinkedIn — an office that we once shared with Friendster.

The other milestone is the fourth anniversary of LinkedIn’s launch on May 5, 2003. I remember “Cinco de LinkedIn” fondly: it started with the founding team signing up, connecting to each other and then inviting the first wave of users to LinkedIn. My wife (then girlfriend) was our first non-employee user so, for about ten minutes, I actually had more connections than Reid! (That didn’t last.)

Growth was slow and steady in the early days: we had 2,500 users after the first week, 6,000 after the first month, and 37,000 after the first six months. By comparison, last week alone we added more than 130,000 new users.

To mark the anniversary, we thought it would be fun to share some screenshots of how LinkedIn looked when it launched. Reid once said, “if you’re not embarrassed by your first release, then you launched too late.” I don’t remember being embarrassed at the time, but four years later, I’ll admit that these screens make me wince. It’s like flipping through my high school yearbook — did we really look like that?

• 
  LinkedIn Home (before sign in), May 2003
• 
  LinkedIn Home (after sign in), May 2003