Walking into LinkedIn this past week has been akin to cruising the strip in Vegas. Different teams have elegantly and some not-so-elegantly (hey, is that our Vegas dedication?) decorated their cubicles in the spirit of teamwork and fun. Ever since, Candy Mielke, Julie Grosso and the HR team, challenged the teams to upgrade to some Cube Chic, we’ve been working on a few ideas and here are the results.

(From Antarctica to “Camp Runamuck” | Source: LinkedIn’s Photo Feed)

Although, there were three winners in both the categories; teams and individuals, I thought we should mention everyone’s contribution since independent of how long each team worked on it, the changes have transformed the company and now when I walk in to work…well, why don’t we take a walk through some of the individual cubicle creations:

• Michael Nguyen – Groovy Golf
• Veronica Vallez – Retro Backyard
• Maria Becerra – Safari
• Helen Shyu – Shanghai 1930’s
• Agiladevi Ramanthan – Autumn
• Ryan Gustafson – Camp Runamuck
• Adi Alurkar – Geek Central (Adi says it’s still “work in progress”)
• Katie Dellamaggiore – Napa Valley Visitor Center
• Jay Thomas – The Art Gallery
• Shirley Xu – Botanical Gardens
• Steven Perez – Wine Country Brewery
• Brittany Schmitt – Wine Country Spa
• Brendon Cassidy – the 9th Hole
• Brandon Salom – Restaurant “The Laundry”
• Brooke Watts – the Day Spa
• Nick Welihozkiy – The Tourist Trap
• Loretta Thomas – The Railroad Crossing
• George Seiters – Executive Wine Tasting Room
• Orly Keren – The Farmer’s Market

(Fruits from the Farmers Market or some Pizza at the Italian Restaurant? |Source: LinkedIn’s Photo Feed)

These may not compare to the Vegas creations, but hey come on cut us some slack — these cubicles were decorated between sips of coffee, red bull and weekend work. However, the most satisfying part was working as a team putting it all together. And, hey, it was all worth it.

Feel free to leave a comment on which of the above is your favorite office space. We’ll reveal the winning contributions next week.

Take a look at the different cubicles

Chris is a Sr. Product Manager, whose core expertise within LinkedIn Answers ranges from “Using LinkedIn” to “Ethics“!

Some of you perusing our site this past week, may have noticed a few changes in the way you organize your Inbox. Yes, there are a few simple changes, besides just the updated look and feel, so I thought I’ll take a brief moment to capture and outline the upgrade to your Inbox user experience.

1. Navigation

First off, when you log into the page you’ll notice that you can now see a total number of action items that require your attention. These action items are culled from pre-existing open items in six different categories: “InMail” & “Introductions”, “Invitations”, “Profiles”, “Q&A” from LinkedIn Answers, “Jobs” and “Recommendations”.

We’ve also made a modification to the “Received”, “Sent” and “Forwarded” icons, which have been moved to the top right hand pane for easier recognition.

2. Sorting & Archival

You can also sort through the various items either by “Sender”, “Subject”, “Status” and or “Date received”. One additional enhancement we have made is your ability to archive all messages at one go. For e.g. when we asked our users for a five word submission for the Webby Awards, we received over 400 answers, which could have been archived much more easily with this capability.

Moving forward, we will be adding feature enhancements to your Inbox experience as is the case with all other aspects of your LinkedIn usage. If you have questions on the Inbox experience, feel free to share them on the blog.

April Kelly runs our customer support team and hears thousands of questions each week from users. Here she answers five frequently asked questions on privacy that may be on your mind as well. Have more questions. Leave a comment on this post.

1. I found myself when I searched my name on Google. How does that happen?

One of the benefits of having a LinkedIn profile is the ability for you to take control of your online identity, thus making it easier for your public profile to be found by non-LinkedIn members on the Web. By default your publicly searchable profile contains only your name, industry, and region. This is described in our Policy under “Information Sharing”.

In addition, you can turn off the publicly searchable version of your profile by selecting the top option “None (off)”. That will remove your public profile from our site. Your public profile may remain in a search engine cache for a short time until the cache is refreshed.

2. I received an invitation from this person and I do not know them, how did they get my email?

If you publish your email publicly as many bloggers and journalists normally do then the chances of your getting invitations via email multiply. If you have not published your email publicly and are receiving invitations please report that to us or leave a comment.
You can also prevent unwanted invitations from other LinkedIn users whom you do not know well by using our “Invitation Block” feature. This feature blocks invitations from people who are not in your LinkedIn “Other Contacts” address book. Invitations that are blocked will go into the “filtered invitations” section of your LinkedIn InBox. You can periodically look through your blocked list to see if there are any invitations from people, you actually know.

3.How secure is LinkedIn Data?

Our privacy policies are certified and monitored by TRUSTe (www.truste.org), “an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to enabling individuals and organizations to establish trusting relationships based on respect for personal identity and information in the evolving networked world.” I would also encourage you to check out our online privacy policy

4. Is there anyway for other people to find out who my direct connections are?

Only your direct connections can know who your other direct connections are on LinkedIn. LinkedIn allows you complete control over your direct connections and we strongly recommend that the best protection is to only connect with people whom you trust to respect your interests.

Your direct connections can see a list of your connections when they view your profile, however you can turn that setting to off by looking for “Connections Browse” within your “Settings“.

Direct connections will never get any contact information for your other connections from LinkedIn, unless they get it directly from the other party.  Instead they will have to request an introduction through you, or through some other party, or to obtain contact information (email address, etc.) from somewhere else.

5. I am out of Invitations, how can I get more?

LinkedIn allows users to send out a cumulative maximum of 3000 default invitations over the lifetime of a user. For people who had already exceeded 3000 at the time the limit was put into place, we automatically increased their limit to equal their current cumulative number sent (not including bounced invitations, but including withdrawn invitations).

Hope these answered some of your questions around privacy but if you have more, please let us know, by leaving a comment on the blog.

Every week, there’s a slew of news items, press mentions and blog posts that talk about LinkedIn. Since, our blog is THE source to aggregate all manner of content related to LinkedIn, we thought it’d be a good idea to give you this past week’s LinkedIn News roundup.  Depending on the response from readers, we may make it a weekly fixture on the blog.

Here are recent press and blog posts from the past couple of weeks that talk about LinkedIn  (everything  from playgrounds to LinkedIn best practices):

#1: San Francisco Chronicle | Playground mentality comes to the office

Many of you who attended Lunch 2.0 at our new digs in Mountain View, may have noticed we gave away four-square balls as swag. Some of you may have seen our web development team playing four square at the SimplyHired Lunch 2.0 events. Well, Jessica Guynn (formerly from SF Chronicle) noticed too:

Four square is also a popular social activity at LinkedIn. After scooter races, basketball and
Whiffle ball flopped as company sports contenders, the Mountain View online service that connects professionals kicked off afternoon four square bouts on a back parking lot.

“Different people had different recollections of the different rules they played by in elementary school,” said Chris Saccheri, 30-year-old LinkedIn director of Web development. “So we made it up as we went along.”

Check out pictures of us at play and work | Subscribe to LinkedIn photos (Source: Flickr)

Quick Update: Check out Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Lunch 2.0, the event we organized a few months ago and read quotes from our colleague, Mike Miller.

#2: Wall Street Journal | Getting a LinkedIn invitation

File this away under tips and tricks. It’s definitely worth reading, especially for those who joined LinkedIn recently. This brief article talks of safeguards to ensure better use of our service. For e.g.

You should generally receive invitations from people who already know your email address and LinkedIn users who attended the same school as you or worked at the same company.

#3: Webware (a CNET site) | Nielsen NetRatings serves up July’s social media numbers

Now, Nielsen/NetRatings’ PR team has released its latest set of figures that track how quickly the top social-networking sites are growing. The results are divided into three different categories of social media: social networks, blogs (and blog platforms) and video sites.

Want to see how fast we’ve grown this past year. Read the article, which lists recent growth numbers for LinkedIn and a few other social media companies between July of last year and this year.

#4: Chris Brogan | Five things to do on LinkedIn

Chris Brogan’s at it again! After an insightful post on Lifehack, this time Chris outlines five ways to use LinkedIn differently.

Reach out to connections on LinkedIn that you know reasonably well and offer to write them a recommendation. Ask if they’re willing to recommend you in return. **Note: it really is important that you ask for recommendations from people you know fairly well.

#5: Wall Street Journal | Big Fish, Smaller Ponds (Subscription required)

The article by Suzanne Barlyn, describes the increasing trend of executives from larger companies moving to startups like LinkedIn. Here’s a snippet:

LinkedIn Corp. had just moved to its Mountain View, Calif., offices last May when Patrick Crane visited to interview for the job of the company’s head of marketing. Workmen were swinging hammers, and cardboard was scattered across the floors. But Mr. Crane, then a marketing executive at Yahoo Inc. in nearby Sunnyvale, was intrigued by the idea of leaving a corporate giant to help build an industry leader.

Read the rest of the article here (subscription required).

Alright, enough about us. Have a question for us, feel free to leave a comment on our most recent post which offered an overview of Top 10 frequently asked questions about LinkedIn. I also provided a link to our HELP & FAQ pages.

Haven’t subscribed to our blog yet?

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So, what exactly are these Top 10 frequently asked questions (FAQ) we get asked. Each day I get emails from users asking questions on the different features of LinkedIn. I thought this may be a good opportunity to channel your web clicks to LinkedIn’s “Help & FAQ” page.

Here’s an overview of some of the more persistent questions from among the Top 10 that I get asked:

Can I edit a recommendation that I’ve written for another LinkedIn user?

Yes. You can revise, replace, or withdraw (ouch!) the recommendations you create by visiting the Manage Recommendations page.

Can I remove a person from my list of connections?

Of course! I’m surprised this question still keeps getting asked. To remove one or more people from your list of connections, go to My Contacts: Connections, click “Remove connections” in the tight-hand margin. Voila! You’ve removed those connections. It’s really that simple.

How can I keep people in my network from being notified when I add a new connection?

Normally, your connections will see a notification on their home page when you add a new connection. If you’d rather not have that happen, follow these 4 easy steps:

• Click the “Account & Settings” link at the top of the page
• Under “Settings,” find “Privacy Settings” and click  “Connections Browse” in the right-hand navigation
• Find the question “Allow your connections to view the rest of your connections list?”
• Select “No,” then click the “Save Changes” button

How can I keep people in my network from seeing who my connections are?

By default, LinkedIn users can see and browse the connections of the people in their network. To hide your connections from the people in your network:

• Click the “Account & Settings” link at the top of the page
• Under “Settings,” find “Privacy Settings” and click “Connections Browse”
• Under “Connections Browse,” select “No”
• Click “Update Information” at the bottom of the page

I accidentally created two accounts. Can I merge them?

Unfortunately, we cannot merge two accounts but we’d recommend that you transfer all pertinent profile information to one account and close the other account. The easiest way for you to close an account is to email us. Please include the email addresses associated with each of the accounts and indicate the primary email address for the account you keep. Please note that you will lose all the information in the account you’re closing.

Feel free to check out the remaining Top FAQs here. Also, if you’ve just become a LinkedIn user and are having basic questions about getting started on LinkedIn, here are the 10 most popular categories of FAQs you may find helpful.

My Basic Account | Settings | My Profile | Connecting | Finding Users | Making Connections | LinkedIn Answers | Finding Jobs | Tools and Plug-ins | Privacy

Have more questions? Feel free to leave a comment on this post or email me at msundar@linkedin.com. If we have a sufficient set of comments left on this blog post, I’ll craft another blog post with the Answers. If you’re new to the blog, feel free to subscribe to our posts on better ways to use LinkedIn (RSS feed here). You can also subscribe to the “Using LinkedIn” category within LinkedIn Answers (RSS feed here).

Subscribe to the LinkedIn blog

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Related posts on “Using LinkedIn”:

1. Getting Started with LinkedIn Answers

2. Lifehack’ing LinkedIn: 5 Tips

3. LinkedIn for Consultants

4. Establishing your online identity through LinkedIn

5. 3 ways to make networking work

6. How do you use LinkedIn? (examples of 3 bloggers using LinkedIn)

We recently launched an enhancement to the member to member invitation feature. The feature was launched to help you connect more efficiently and easily with your colleagues, classmates, and business partners. The feature enhancement we’re rolling out provides users with more options to invite those fellow LinkedIn members who’ve collaborated with you on a professional level either through “Groups and Associations” and/or “Activities and Societies.” The original options include “Colleague,” “Classmate,” “Business Partner,” “Friend,” and/or “Other.”

The value of listing your groups, associations, activities, and societies on your profile is to help other members in these groups find you. If you have a group or association on your profile, click “View My Profile as others see it.” Scroll down to the Groups and Associations section and click on one of the links. This action will conduct a search for other people with the same keywords in their profile. If you see someone you know in the search results, you can invite them to connect.

How does it work?

When you view another LinkedIn member’s profile (someone you are not connected to), you may see an option to add this person to your network.

When you click “Add <First Name> to your network,” you will be prompted to select how you know this person.

If you choose Groups and Associations as how you know the person, you will be presented with a drop down list of Groups and Associations. The drop down list is comprised of the Groups and Associations that appear on your profile in the Additional Information section. If you don’t see the specific group or association, you can choose other and type in a new group or association. After you send the invitation, this information will automatically be added to your profile.

Similarly, if you choose Classmate as how you know the person, you may also see Activities and Societies. It will only appear if you have already entered some information in the Activities and Societies section of your profile, which appears under Education.

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A few notes of caution:

1. Only connect to people you know and who are likely to accept your invitation. If enough people say they don’t know you, then you may need to enter an email address for each new invitation you send. This is one way we try to protect users from spam.

2. The Groups and Associations field on the profile is a text field where the comma should be used to separate multiple groups. We use this logic to help parse the field to create the drop down list and separate the groups and associations links on your profile.

To add groups and associations to your profile now, click here.

For discussion on LinkedIn Answers: Do you like the interface for inviting people to connect on LinkedIn?

By day, Omar Lee collaborates with the other members of the Design and Web Development team to make the LinkedIn experience a rewarding one for our users. The rest of the time, he’s busy designing for news outlets like the New York Times to American Idol finalists! Here’s his story… 

Something that few people know about me (well, until now) is that I have a secondary career outside of my primary one as a visual designer for the web — I’m a freelance illustrator. The sort of work I do runs the gamut from editorial (New York Times, Newsweek, Business Week) to commercial (Sprint, Volkswagen, McDonald’s). Aside from the simple thrill that comes with getting paid to draw stuff, I like to think that the rapid concepting and quick execution required in illustration, particularly the editorial variety, keeps my skills sharp and makes me a better visual designer.

This strange part-time job of mine makes for some absurd career moments. The friendly-but-heated debate with an art director over the merits of using dinosaurs as a metaphor for obsolescence. Would it be too obvious? Too jokey? Too scary-looking? Bleary-eyed, late-night Google image searches for reference photos of the second actor who played Darren on Bewitched. The weekend call from an advertising agency asking me if I would be willing to air-draw in a darkened room with an assortment of colored flashlights.

To date, though, my oddest experience as an illustrator was the evening I received no fewer than 36 overly excited e-mails and text messages, littered with exclamation points: "OMG! I just saw Blake wearing your shirt!!!"DOOD! UR SHIRT ON TV! XLNT!" To the chagrin of my American Idol-addicted friends, my initial reaction was: "Um, who’s Blake?" But once I realized that they were talking about THAT show — you know, the one with the mean guy who tells people that they have no business singing — I got sort of excited. The t-shirt in question was one that I had designed for Poketo, a small Los Angeles-based company, a couple of years ago and it seemed that Blake Lewis, an American Idol hopeful from Seattle, was wearing it. I’d seen a random person or two wearing one on MUNI (San Francisco’s version of public transportation) but this was national television! So surreal! So exciting! Chris Saccheri, our Director of Web Development, was thoughtful enough to get some screen captures from the show, which I promptly posted on Flickr.

(American Idol Blake Lewis wearing the Poketo shirt on the show | Source: Omar Lee)

One of the key features of LinkedIn, is the ability to leverage the “wisdom of the professional crowd” by using a popular feature called LinkedIn Answers. Mike Lin, our senior UI designer, outlines the first five steps one should follow when using LinkedIn Answers for the first time:

1. Post your own question to a website or blog:
LinkedIn Answers now has a ’share this’ link which appears at the lower right hand corner under each question. Click on ‘Share This’ to e-mail the question to a friend, add it to del.icio.us or digg, orgrab a permalink to a publicly viewable URL.

2. View all your Questions & Answers:
From the homepage of LinkedIn Answers you can click on the ‘View all your questions & answers’ link in the My Q&A module (located in the upper left hand corner), or on the ‘My Q&A’ link (located in the global navigation panel).

3. Managing your Questions:
By clicking on your question within My Q&A (see above), you have a few options for managing your question depending on whether or not it’s open or closed.

For open questions, you can:
• Extend the closing date

• Forward this question to people who might be able to help answer it

• Close the Question

For closed questions, you can:
• Choose a different best answer

• Completely hide question

• Re-open this question to answers

4. Subscribe to categories via RSS:
Have a favorite category that you like to answer in? You can subscribe to RSS feeds via several blog aggregators (such as Bloglines) or copy the RSS link to subscribe to an aggregator that’s not listed.

Simply use the ‘Browse’ module in the left hand column to navigate to the category you’re interested in subscribing to, and you should see a link to that category’s feed.

5. Search Answers:
There’s a great depth of knowledge that’s already been collected within LinkedIn Answers. You can use the pull-down in the search box to search LinkedIn Answers from most pages on the site.

Besides working and blogging at LinkedIn, Mike also manages one of the few community blogs on a San Francisco neighborhood called Potrero Hill. Check out other Mike Lin posts on our LinkedIn blog, here and here.