LinkedIn is proud to be participating in this week’s launch of Open Social, a new set of open APIs to allow developers to easily build and deploy social applications across the web. 

As a software developer, small company, or large corporation, you have choices of where to invest your time. How do you get the most return on the time you invest in writing code? The web brought about huge advantages in the platforms you could reach, replacing highly proprietary desktop operating systems. We all flocked to the web. Now, Google does the same with social applications.

Marc Andreessen did a great job reviewing many of the details around Open Social, so rather than replicate his words here, I’m going to just focus on what Open Social will mean for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has a community of over 15 million professionals now, including executives from all 500 companies in the Fortune 500.  We’re dedicated to providing great business applications that make professionals more productive every day, and we want the broadest set of those great applications possible.  Open Social provides us with a mechanism for developers of great business applications to leverage the power of the LinkedIn professional network and reach that audience, all using known web-standards of HTML & Javascript.

At LinkedIn, we’ll support business applications that fit our focus on great business applications for professionals. Got a great idea for a business application you think LinkedIn users will gain from? Open Social is a way to get it into LinkedIn and any other compatible platform you want to target. We’ll follow up with a blog posting detailing our approach and how to get involved.

LinkedIn signed up for this vision because we believe that the web architecture rewards open models. They are good for end users, good for developers, and thus good for LinkedIn.

I had the chance yesterday to spend quite a bit of time with the partners who are launching Open Social later this week – Max Levchin & Keith Rabois from Slide, Marc Andreessen from Ning, Joe Kraus from Google, Ali Partovi from iLike, Ramu Yalimanchi & Akash Garg from Hi5.  It was great to see this much energy around a new open standard for social applications.

Open Social is only part of the larger story for LinkedIn about leveraging the power of your professional network, both on and off the LinkedIn site. 

LinkedIn is proud to be participating in this week’s launch of Open Social, a new set of open APIs to allow developers to easily build and deploy social applications across the web.

As a software developer, small company, or large corporation, you have choices of where to invest your time. How do you get the most return on the time you invest in writing code? The web brought about huge advantages in the platforms you could reach, replacing highly proprietary desktop operating systems. We all flocked to the web. Now, Google does the same with social applications.

Marc Andreessen did a great job reviewing many of the details around Open Social, so rather than replicate his words here, I’m going to just focus on what Open Social will mean for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has a community of over 15 million professionals now, including executives from all 500 companies in the Fortune 500.  We’re dedicated to providing great business applications that make professionals more productive every day, and we want the broadest set of those great applications possible.  Open Social provides us with a mechanism for developers of great business applications to leverage the power of the LinkedIn professional network and reach that audience, all using known web-standards of HTML & Javascript.

At LinkedIn, we’ll support business applications that fit our focus on great business applications for professionals. Got a great idea for a business application you think LinkedIn users will gain from? Open Social is a way to get it into LinkedIn and any other compatible platform you want to target. We’ll follow up with a blog posting detailing our approach and how to get involved.

LinkedIn signed up for this vision because we believe that the web architecture rewards open models. They are good for end users, good for developers, and thus good for LinkedIn.

I had the chance yesterday to spend quite a bit of time with the partners who are launching Open Social later this week – Max Levchin & Keith Rabois from Slide, Marc Andreessen from Ning, Joe Kraus from Google, Ali Partovi from iLike, Ramu Yalimanchi & Akash Garg from Hi5.  It was great to see this much energy around a new open standard for social applications.

Open Social is only part of the larger story for LinkedIn about leveraging the power of your professional network, both on and off the LinkedIn site.

Some may view swag as being a unique part of Silicon Valley’s startup culture. But let’s face it, no matter where you work, a little swag goes a long way in building camaraderie, team spirit and your individual brand (much like LinkedIn helps with your professional brand). Starting today, you’ll be able to share the brand experience of LinkedIn whether it be wearing our custom-fitted tees or carrying LinkedIn Gear (ranging from backpacks, ballcaps and more). There’s something for everybody at the LinkedIn Store.

Check out the LinkedIn Store

At LinkedIn we’re proud of the people who are helping us build our business, which is why every “model” that you see in our store has a day-job helping LinkedIn succeed. Next to each photo you’ll find a link. Click on it to learn more about the people who make LinkedIn great.

At LinkedIn, good business relationships get rewarded. We love our vendors and we love promoting them for their good work–like Paul Navabpour, whose promotional agency provided these top-quality products and helped us build this custom store, and photographer Dave Getzschman, whose magic makes our in-house talent shine.

Got a great idea for a product that we should offer our network? Or a color you’d love for a t-shirt? Leave a comment.

We’ve just released our first version of a standardized company directory. This directory is a foundational component for enhancing a variety of features on LinkedIn, such as colleague reconnect, company search, and job search. We will also be able to leverage this directory to build brand new features, which will be announced in the coming months.

The directory was built using some high powered analytics and the data that users have provided about their companies. There is a rich database of companies in this release, and we will be gradually adding more companies over time.

If you don’t see your company in the type ahead, go ahead and put it on your profile and we’ll pick it up with a future iteration.

What does it look like?

When you are adding or editing a position on your profile, you will be able to start typing your company name and we’ll suggest some matches based on what you type. The matches include both alphabetical matches as well as related companies, such as subsidiaries and parent companies.

After you select a company from the list, we will pre-populate the company display name, industry, size, type, and ticker symbol whenever the information is available. You are free to edit these fields on your profile.

You can try out the new type ahead by adding or editing a position on your profile. Leave a comment with any questions.

I’ve been wanting to publish the following two links on LinkedIn and social networking, but it’s been a busy two days putting together the details for the upcoming LinkedIn Q&A event, featuring Daniel Lyons (Sr. editor at Forbes, faux blogger – “Fake Steve Jobs” and author of “Option$) and Guy Kawasaki (former Apple evangelist and founder at Truemors).

Thus far we’ve received roughly 250 RSVPs and since seating is limited, it may be a good idea to hurry up and RSVP over at event site Upcoming. And, now back to the post.

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Here’s a couple of quick posts and a podcast on International news from the LinkedIn world. This seems all the more appropriate since only recently we reached a million users in the UK (read Liz’s post here).

* MIS Financial Review, Australia | The Business of Social Networking

Liz O’Donnell (Director, International) participated in a recent panel discussion on the Scoop, a podcast series by Mark Jones, in an episode titled “The Business of Social Networking“. Check out the podcast below which also features (besides Liz), MySpace Australia managing director Rebekah Horne, and Technology Venture Partners principal Mike Zimmerman.

Check out the podcast here

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* Economic Times, India | Log on to networking sites and find a job

Finding a job through networking sites? Sounds familiar? And, this time the news is from India. Stanton Chase Vice President Asia-Pacific R Suresh, describes his recent conversion to LinkedIn and subsequent experience.

“In the last two-three months, these networking sites have crossed the threshold. LinkedIn is
definitely a valuable tool. Something like the yellow pages,” he says.

Stanton Chase and indeed other executive search firms can no longer ignore the emerging
models for recruitment such as business and professional networking sites. Recruitments at large, in some cases even CXO level recruitments through sites such as LinkedIn and Ryze, have made search firms weave these into their recruitment strategy.

Check out the entire article here

Have you ever wondered what goes in the mind of Fake Steve Jobs? On November 6th, LinkedIn will be hosting a live Q&A session with senior editor at Forbes and popular tech blogger, Dan Lyons (of “Fake Steve Jobs” fame), which will be moderated by Guy Kawasaki, former Chief Evangelist at Apple and co-founder at Truemors (with questions from LinkedIn users).

(from l – r: Dan Lyons and Guy Kawasaki | Source: Hyku)

Further details below:

* LinkedIn Q&A Event | Confessions of Fake Steve Jobs

* Date & Time: November 6 @ 6 pm.

* Venue: Computer History Museum, 1401 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View, CA 94043
(Map it)

* RSVP: The event is open to all but there is only limited seating, so hurry up and RSVP.

RSVP on Upcoming

* Ask Fake Steve Jobs a question: Even if you can’t make it to the event, Guy Kawasaki would like to know what you’d ask Fake Steve Jobs if you could (via LinkedIn Answers).

Ask question here

Dan Lyons is currently on a book tour to promote his recently released book “Option$”, which the New York Times says reads like “The Devil Wears Mock Turtlenecks”.

“Options” is the  outgrowth of a blog that Mr. Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes and a novelist, started in the summer of 2006, at fakesteve.blogspot.com. The book weaves the blog’s greatest hits into a cohesive narrative that enfolds recent events at Apple, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into alleged accounting irregularities (backdated options), and the release of the iPhone. (Source: New York Times)

New York Times’ Liesl Schillinger calls “Mr. Lyons’s portrait hilarious and eerily specific; you get the feeling he planted a spycam in one of Mr. Jobs’s mock turtles” and Entertainment Weekly’s John Simons calls “the narrator of this dead-tree account so textured and real that even his most idle thoughts amuse.”

Join us on Nov 6 @ 6 pm at the Computer History Museum, to find out more about the legend of Fake Steve Jobs, the real Guy Kawasaki and related topics on technology that all Silicon Valley cube dwellers will find fascinating. For those of you not in the Bay Area, no worries, we’ll be live streaming the event. Stay tuned for more details.

Let the LinkedIn Sessions begin.

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Related blog posts:

* The last time we threw a party this is what went down; you were LunchedIn!

* Our friends at Lunch 2.0 blogged about the upcoming LinkedIn Q&A event here. Also, check out upcoming Lunch 2.0 events on their blog.

* The man himself, Fake Steve Jobs looks forward to the dance-off with Guy Kawasaki!

* Owen Thomas at Valleywag wonders what will unfold at the event on November 6th?

* Guy Kawasaki blogs about the event too

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Before we get to a couple of recent posts on personal branding, I thought it’d be a good idea to start the post with the video of Reid Hoffman’s recent keynote presentation at the “Graphing Social Patterns” conference in San Jose.

Reid was also on a recent panel discussion on Social Networking at the recently concluded Google Zeitgest conference in Mountain View, which featured speakers ranging from John Legend to President Bill Clinton (via satellite). Check out that video here.

So, here are a couple of interesting articles we found this past week on building your personal brand:

* Do you know who is viewing your personal brand?

An interesting piece from the popular Web Worker Daily blog, Dan Schawbel highlights 5 tips on protecting your personal brand online.

It’s important to note that as you build your brand and reputation, you take significant time to ensure integrity and accuracy. You never want to Google your name and find that you are misrepresented by a blogger or a comment on your Facebook wall. As you become a web worker, you want to establish a daily means of checking your status. There are way too many people that lose opportunities from what employers have seen online

As we’ve outlined in prior posts, particularly the most recent one by Steve Patrizi, LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to get started on strengthening your online brand with a focus on your professional accomplishments:

Branding is something that we as professionals need to take very seriously on an individual level. Ten years ago, Tom Peters penned an article for Fast Company called “The Brand Called You”, which stressed that it’s absolutely imperative for all professionals to develop a unique and personal “professional brand” that communicates the value they have to offer to prospective employers, employees, clients and business partners.

* Is your public image a liability?

Liz Ryan, the Savvy Networker asks if your public image is a liability, once again draws attention to the importance and the value of your online brand:

A majority of employers now routinely check their job candidates’ MySpace, Linkedin and Facebook profiles for any impropriety, prior to making an offer. Can you blame them? It’s not so much that your prospective employer worries about your keg parties or those photos of you with your favorite bong. It’s that they worry, with reason, about your judgment in throwing these items online for anyone to see.

I’d like to once again draw attention to the above mentioned blog post by Steve Patrizi on how LinkedIn allows you to control that professional brand of yours most effectively:

That idea (of the “The Brand Called You“) was true then and it’s even more true today. The major search engines and social networks have made all of us far more accessible and visible than ever before, making it so much more critical that we actively manage our own professional brands. And that’s where LinkedIn really shines, allowing you to take control of the major elements of your professional brand: the people you associate with, the questions you ask and the answers you provide, the recommendations you give and receive, and the way in which you express your experiences and skills.

Have you begun nurturing your professional brand online as you do offline? Feel free to leave comments on how you’ve used LinkedIn to effectively strengthen your professional brand.

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What started off as a weekly pick of a popular question from LinkedIn Answers is now becoming a tough job of making our weekly pick with so many interesting questions popping up. So, this week, we’re featuring two questions from the blogging community along with an assortment of responses to the question itself. Interestingly, both these resulted in blog posts with the authors/respondents’  point-of-view:

* Robyn Tippins, Community Manager at MyBlogLog at Yahoo! says on her blog:

Check out the responses, already, after 12 hours, to my question. I came from my blog post and the rest all came from my 200-ish LinkedIn contacts.

Is that typical?  Do people normally get this large of an answer to a question or is it that this was just a great question that lots of people wanted to answer?

Either way, very cool.  This will help me a great deal in my talk.

Robyn, I’ve had great responses the last few times I posed a question to my professional network (here and here).  Could the fact that you are a community manager have something to do with it? :) But, I digress. So here’s the question that Robyn asked her professional network on LinkedIn, while preparing for a talk she’s working on:

Selected LinkedIn Answers:

Floriana Mulazzi, Marketing and Communication Manager

One of the most rewarded and most powerful blog and web community in Italy (and not only), is the Ducati Motor one. Very engaging, sincere, honest, it’s been one of the first born in Italy and increased the success of the company since the early 2000. It is studied in the best economics universities as a successful case study.

Francois Gossieaux, Entrepreneur, marketing enthusiast, strategist & innovator

eBay has a well documented case of successful customer communities in Germany. Intuit has well documented customer communities. Harley Davidson uses customer communities as part of their new product development very successfully.

WebMD, CarSpace, Samsung, etc…

Jake McKee, Founder & Lead Strategist at Ant’s Eye View

Well, I’m biased, but I really am impressed by the various community activities that LEGO has done and continues to do – from developing relationships on existing fan sites to the multitude of activities on LEGO.com for kids, to projects like LEGO Factory, etc.

Macromedia used to be my shining example of how to engage your consumers. I think the efforts have taken a hit post-Adobe merger, but they seem to be trying to find themselves again. I think they do a great job overall of engaging users, much of it behind the scenes in the product development process.

Lastly, I recently met with a friend from The Economist magazine - they’re trying a HUGE amount of social/digital strategies to see how to best marry print with web with social. Watch these guys – they’re not getting enough recognition for the stunning amount of work they’re doing.

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Karl Long, Web/Social Media Integration Manager at Nokia, writes on his blog:

Someone on LinkedIn just posed this question “How can one make Blogs more enjoyable or What is that you do to maintain the popularity/readership of your blog?“. Here are my thoughts on this, this may not be all that leads to a successful blog, but these are for me pretty essential ingredients: Focus, Passion, and Originality.

(to be continued next week)

It’s great to see how LinkedIn Answers is fueling the knowledge network that revolves around us and mentioned above are just two such examples. The blog will explore similar questions from different categories on a weekly basis and you can check those posts out under the “Answers” category on the blog.

Leave a comment if you’ve been impressed with any particular question on LinkedIn Answers or if you’d like us to feature any particular category of questions.

Last week, you heard me chat with Chris Richman, Product Manager, with recent feature updates to LinkedIn’s Communication system. This week, I had a chance to chat with our Director of Engineering for the Content Distribution Network (CDN) group, Ruslan Belkin. Hopefully, the interview will give you a better picture of the internal workings of our engineering teams, one of which Ruslan leads. So, check out the short 3:14 minutes conversation I had with Ruslan, followed by a quick summary.

If you haven’t seen the video and don’t plan on doing so, I thought I’ll summarize some of the key areas Ruslan and I chatted about. Actually, here are the three topics we discussed:

1. What does Ruslan’s team work on?

The CDN group is responsible for the following components of LinkedIn’s communication system: member affiliation networks (connections and groups), invitations, the network updates and other feeds, the communication platform, contacts management and geography location search.
   
2. Product/Engineering collaboration:

Within the group we have a number of what we call Product/Engineering tracks: networks track, communication platform track, and the contacts management track. Each track has an engineering lead and a counterpart on the Product side with respective feature and infrastructure projects. Feature releases are typically every two weeks.

3. What’s the engineering environment like?

Flexible: You will work in an agile development environment where results of your work will be visible to millions of LinkedIn users (currently there are more than 15 million LinkedIn users) very rapidly and this could be very rewarding for any engineer

Problem Solving: You will be faced with challenges of scale (huge data sets, stringent performance requirements, the need for high quality secure software to protect our customers) and will be exposed to innovative architectural solutions implemented on a large scale: asynchronous communication, caching, data replication.

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Have ideas, feedback, suggestions or questions? As you heard Ruslan say during the interview, the three best ways to reach us:

a. Contact the community guy; that’d be me. Email: msundar@linkedin.com
b. Either pose questions or answer questions on LinkedIn Answers. In particular, the “Using LinkedIn” category
c. Leave a comment at the end of this blog post

LinkedIn just hit a bit of a milestone this month internationally – we reached the million member mark in the UK.  With nearly two thousand British professionals signing up on any given day, LinkedIn has become the go-to site for those who want to advance their professional know-how (not to mention their know-who). Apparently, the fashionable set agrees – the UK edition of Esquire Magazine has just nominated LinkedIn for a Man At The Top Business Award in the Best Business Tool category.

We want to take this opportunity to thank all our million UK members – and those from within the UK and around the world who invited them – for making this happen. We’ll be celebrating this week with a few of our own events in London, Birmingham and Manchester.  But if you’re elsewhere in the UK, or elsewhere in the world, why not take this opportunity to reconnect with your own professional network?  Take them out for a pint and all that.  But dress to impress – Esquire might be watching and you don’t want to disappoint!

Also, we’re hosting events in a few cities (London, Manchester, Birmingham) to coincide with the milestone. LinkedIn staff will be there, but more importantly, it will be a great chance to get together in person with other local LinkedIn members.

Space is limited. Please RSVP below to the address corresponding to your preferred city. If we have a spot for you, we’ll email back with the details. All events are in the evening.

London: Tuesday October 16

linkedinlondon@bitepr.com (Full)

Manchester: Thursday October 18

linkedinmanchester@bitepr.com

Birmingham: Thursday October 18

linkedinbirmingham@bitepr.com