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LinkedIn News Roundup | The Fastest Growing Social Network and more...

Another quick roundup from the world of social networking over the past few weeks. Before we get into the specific articles, many of you may have read the post by Adam Nash about LinkedIn's involvement in Open Social, and today we have a video of the LinkedIn Open Social presentation that Adam made at the Google Campfire event (04:30)
http://www.youtube.com/v/VCEydxaxQdg&rel=1&color1=0x006699&color2=0x54abd6&border=0]

Here are three other topics that encompassed LinkedIn themes these past few weeks, starting off with a Nielsen Netratings' report that highlighted LinkedIn as the fastest growing social network:

1. Fastest growing social networking site | Fortune

The blogosphere gravitated towards a Nielsen Netratings report (via Fortune), which covered the fastest growing social networks (year over year). Here's a sampling of blogs on that topic:

* Web Pro News

Quick, what's the fastest-growing social network over the last year?

MySpace?  Nope.  Facebook?  Nope.  Bebo?  Now, let’s be serious.  According to Nielsen Online (and Fortune), it’s . . . LinkedIn.

* Marketing Shift

While Facebook has been getting most of the attention of developers, LinkedIn's involvement in OpenSocial with Google et al. will foster creation of new application to help business folk advance themselves and their companies.

Maybe it's my age (okay, yes it is my age), but I prefer to keep my social circle focused on people who I really know and do my socializing through email or on the phone with my expanded circle of friends and colleagues.

2. LinkedIn CEOs Straw Poll | USA Today

Did you know that there are currently 145, 000 CEOs on LinkedIn. When polled on their political choices for Elections 08, here's what USA Today found:

None of the 154 CEOs who responded to USA TODAY's survey said that they typically voted Democratic but intended to vote Republican in 2008.

Still, Giuliani was the favorite. He also won in a scientific survey of small-business owners by payroll-processing company SurePayroll and a much larger unscientific survey of more than 2,000 CEOs by Vistage International, which says it's the world's largest CEO membership organization. LinkedIn, which says it has 145,000 CEOs signed up, found Clinton in the lead in a small, unscientific response.

Vistage allowed its CEOs to vote undecided, which carried the day with 37%, followed by Giuliani (21%), Romney (11%), Clinton (9%) and Obama (7%). LinkedIn CEOs casting 446 votes online were 47% Republican and 44% Democratic. Of those, Clinton received 29% of the votes to 18% for Giuliani and 16% for Obama.

3. International News | Telegraph and the Guardian

Here are a couple of articles featuring Reid Hoffman's trip to Europe, which covers the

a. Reid's advice to entrepreneurs | Telegraph

His advice to entrepreneurs is simply: "actually go and do it!". Websites are much cheaper now to build, he said, and once you hit a 'spark', it can quickly turn into a forest fire. Base your
innovations on cultural needs and focus on adding new tools – "if you don't add anything new, then – bang!".

And he should know – after leaving PayPal in October 2002, he assembled a team to start on LinkedIn in November.

"I couldn't take a holiday", Mr Hoffman said, "Venture finance thought the web was dead back then, but I thought networking sites were going to be big.

"I wanted to go one step further: finance the social networking sites, and start building the professional networking sites."

LinkedIn is now the largest professional networking site in the UK, with 1m users. It has a high calibre of members too – senior executives for 96 of the FTSE 100 companies have their own LinkedIn profile pages.

In the US, all of the Fortune 500 companies have an executive level presence.

b. Silicon Valley comes to Oxford | Guardian

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman said that the discussion about a new web bubble is usually too simplified. Costs of hardware, software and bandwidth are all far less this time around, and the ad market online is far greater. "There will be some trough and companies being corrected, but relatively few. The pace of development is now so fast that we're seeing the next wave of disruption starting before the last has kicked in."