Many users have asked us for a RSS feed of Network Updates and as I’d commented over two weeks ago, we now allow you to subscribe to your network updates via RSS!  Find the ubiquitous orange RSS logo right next to the Network Updates sign on LinkedIn’s homepage, right below the LinkedIn News module.

Once you click through that you’ll be taken to this landing page, which provides you the option to subscribe to an RSS feed of Network Updates.

While on the topic of RSS feeds, this is probably a good time to remind you that you can actually subscribe to a feed of LinkedIn Answers in any particular category/sub-category and that way be informed of the latest Questions & Answers whenever they happen.

We’ll continue making it easier for you to access LinkedIn’s features wherever you go. Did you know that you can access LinkedIn’s Network Updates on your mobile device. Check out Jerry’s post earlier today on new LinkedIn Mobile features with a demo on the iPhone. Feel free to leave a message with feedback, comments, or suggestions.

LinkedIn Mobile is an exciting project not just for mobile users but also mobile developers. The application is built using Ruby on Rails. On the back end, it makes use of the new LinkedIn APIs to RESTfully communicate with the LinkedIn business logic layer as well as memcache for boosting application performance.

On the front end, we use the Rails custom format facilities to generate custom views for mobile (WAP) and iPhone. In order to make WAP work for most phones in the market, we restrict ourselves to XHTML MP Basic and WCSS. We also designed the app to ensure a good UI experience, even on phones that have CSS support disabled.

For iPhone, we implemented our own small (< 4KB) javascript library to enhance the user experience with features including AJAX loading in background, alphabar on Contacts page, and DOM page caching. The result is rewarding the interface is responsive even on a slow network.

Since we launched LinkedIn Mobile, we are pleased to receive many feature requests from the users and we would like to let you know that we are working hard on them. In the last few weeks, we introduced the following features:

* Sending messages to your connections via LinkedIn

* See status updates in your network

* Browse your connections’ connections

In addition to the above three features, you can also email your connections from your handset and you’ll definitely notice a quicker access to your LinkedIn app on the iPhone. Yes, we just made your iPhone experience better, faster and more productive.

Please continue to send us feedback and thank you for using LinkedIn Mobile. Check out below my original video on LinkedIn Mobile – a crash course on accessing LinkedIn on your iPhone.

Most of you reading this post have probably read my most recent announcement when we announced APIs and a platform strategy for developers to integrate LinkedIn into their applications, wherever it may be on the web. My my most recent post outlined how Apec, one of the largest job sites in France, integrates LinkedIn functionality into their site. Given below are a couple more examples of similar implementations: BusinessWeek and SimplyHired (with video demos):

BusinessWeek LinkedIn API Implementation

Ever read about a company doing something interesting or important and want to talk directly to the person at the company responsible for it? Now you can. Go to Business Week. Read an article. In the Story Tools area, you’ll see a link to see your LinkedIn connections at the company mentioned in the article.

Business Week has implemented the first LinkedIn widget to show you connections at a company mentioned on the page. It’s a simple Javascript widget that integrates your LinkedIn network with the content of the business article you are reading. This is definitely the start of many more such integrations across the web that’ll enable you to leverage the strength of your LinkedIn network.

Want to see how it works? Check out a video demo below.

SimplyHired – LinkedIn API Integration

Last time you looked for a job, did you ever want to know whether anyone could help you get in the door for an interview? Now you can do that on SimplyHired site, via a LinkedIn API integration. Look at a job posting and click the IN icon to see who you know at the hiring company. Then, simply reach out to them or a common connection and ask for help in getting the job. Check out a quick demo below where I walk through a similar scenario.

You’ll notice that this looks different from the Business Week integration. Simply Hired used the LinkedIn APIs to build the interface with specific names of people.

These first integrations are examples of integrations you’ll start seeing across the web on news sites, job sites, and more. For a deeper example, take a look at what Apec has done with the LinkedIn APIs in my earlier blog post here.

If you want to develop an integration on your application or website, go here

If you want to develop an application that runs on LinkedIn, go here

LinkedIn has been really proud to work with Apec to develop the APIs required for them to tightly integrate your LinkedIn network with their job hunting web site.

If you are in France, then Apec needs no introduction. For the rest of you, Apec is a nonprofit organization that offers job listings and career resources to French professionals, and is one of France’s largest job sites. But Apec doesn’t just list job postings. They want to help you find a job and build your career in every way they can. So, they have offices throughout France to help you in person.

And now, they are deeply integrating professional networking into the job search process and beyond though this integration with LinkedIn. Earlier this month, some of you may have read blog posts that described our collaboration with Apec. Here’s a quick video demo of how that collaboration plays out in terms of LinkedIn functionality on the Apec site.

Apec’s integration is very deep. They both help you build and use your LinkedIn network right on their site. So, as you look for a job, you are building a healthy professional network, which helps you long term.

You’ll notice that you can see who you know at hiring companies, in industries, and in countries in which you might want to work.  You can also search LinkedIn directly within Apec, helping you find hiring managers and helping hiring managers find you.  They also pipe in your network updates just to make sure you stay close to your LinkedIn network while you are on the Apec site.

This has been a win-win for both Apec as well as for us. While Apec is one of the largest job boards in France, LinkedIn continues growing the world’s largest online group of professionals, with close to 21 million professionals as of today. Moreover, in a global economy when the world is getting flatter with each passing day, even looking for a job down the street requires access to a global network of business professionals to help you.

For more information, check out a very cool interactive demo on Apec.fr site. Please note: The demo is in French.

While some of you are reading the latest on the XM buyout yesterday, I had a chance to peruse some of our top question on LinkedIn Answers on the topic of Mergers and Acquisitions.

Just yesterday, the buyout was approved by the Justice Department.

The Justice Department has approved the $5 billion buyout of XM Satellite Radio by a rival, Sirius Satellite Radio, saying the deal was unlikely to hurt competition or consumers. (Source: New York Times)

So, if you were unaware, LinkedIn Answers has a sub-category called “Mergers and Acquisitions” under “Finance and Accounting” that professionals bouncing ideas ranging from valuation of an acquisition to research sources on the topic. Here are three picks from within that category that’ll give you a feel for the quality of questions and answers that you find on the topic of M&A within LinkedIn Answers. Let’s start with one of the open questions.

Yes, that questions (above) should have been spell checked, but despite that it yielded a slew of insightful answers from the following:

Or, more in-depth answers, particularly this one from a manager of corporate development at 3M – Zafar Khan.

There are other questions that help provide resources to many of your unanswered questions:

* Sergey Prasol, asks what’d be a useful source in the internet about M&A that covers topics ranging from financial model templates to theoretical info. Here it is.

The answers range from Business Value Express to Pratt’s Stats. A ton of valuable information for those immersed in this field. For a plethora of answers on the topic of Mergers and Acquisitions from over 20 million professionals, go here.

A large group of Linkers were present at Digital Hollywood’s Media Summit event in NYC March 12-13, 2008. The conference had a great turn out and terrific keynotes from folks like Bob Iger of Walt Disney. LinkedIn’s VP of Marketing, Patrick Crane, spoke on a panel about “Social Media, UGM, Web Applications and Advertising: Monetizing the Interactive Experience.” During the show Patrick was interviewed by Pop17, an Internet TV show. See video below.

This event was the first time that we brought our LinkedIn kiosks with us to an event. The kiosks enabled Linkers to show conference attendees how to sign up for an account, improve their profiles and how to add new contacts that they just met at the conference to their profiles. Media Summit also did some really cool stuff like including a LinkedIn logo next to speakers that have LinkedIn profiles (so you could find out more information about the speaker before/after the event and even see how many degrees away from the speakers you are or if you have any connections in common). The LinkedIn logos on the site were hyperlinked, so you got taken right to the speaker’s profile page without having to do a search.

Most importantly, the event was a great opportunity for us to mingle with LinkedIn users and hear their thoughts on what they love and look forward to seeing on Linked In. The trip to NYC wasn’t all work and no play though. It was also a wonderful way for some of our Mountain View-based employees to catch up with the NYC-based crew.

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Upcoming events that LinkedIn plans on attending this year include: ASCAP’s “I Create Music” Expo in Los Angeles, April 10-12th, The Digital Hollywood Conference in Los Angeles, May 5-8th and The Warrillow Summit 2008 in Las Vegas May 12-14th. Hopefully we’ll catch up with you there!

Nick Dellamaggiore

The last blog post on LinkedIn News, a few weeks ago, covered some of the sharing capabilities that we introduced. With this week’s release, we’re introducing some new features that should make “LinkedIn News” a more valuable resource for keeping up to date on the latest and greatest news about your company.

Check out a quick demo video (2:26 minutes) where we go over some of LinkedIn News’ feature enhancements. Screenshots after the jump.

There are two important advancements in LinkedIn News today. Here are quick snapshots of what those differences are:

1. Surfacing most relevant information

We know that most business professionals don’t have time to scour hundreds of news articles during their busy workday.  You want to quickly find the news your colleagues are reading today so you can keep up with the office water cooler conversations.  The “Most Activity” section of LinkedIn News promotes the most interesting articles your colleagues are reading, sharing, and discussing on LinkedIn.

We also want to make it easier for you to consume information at a glance before you decide to either read it or discuss it with your peers from your company.

2. News Discussion within your company

Yes, that’s right. This latest iteration of LinkedIn News features the ability to discuss popular news articles with everyone within your company. In essence, this version of LinkedIn News has the potential to be the online version of the company watercooler where you get to discuss articles of interest in your professional spheres (company, industry, etc…)

One thing that sets LinkedIn News apart from more traditional community-driven news sites is that our news discussions always take place within your semi-private company group. Any news discussion started on LinkedIn will only be visible to co-workers who’ve been confirmed to work at your company. This secure discussion environment will hopefully encourage the sharing of candid and insightful commentary amongst colleagues you work with everyday.

3. Discussion Network Updates

Of course, a discussion isn’t going to be very interesting if nobody knows it’s happening! Whenever you create a discussion or comment on a LinkedIn News article, we’ll notify your LinkedIn connections that work at your company, asking them to join the discussion.  These notifications will show up in your colleagues Network Updates feed on their LinkedIn home page.

More to come…

Be on the lookout for more features as LinkedIn continues to build out its News and Groups feature set. Thanks to the following great engineers for their help in building News Discussions: Armin Ahumada, Oscar Chan, Chris Saccheri, and Scott Schlegel and Eishay Smith.

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We’ve also read your comments in the last blog post on LinkedIn News and we’ve addressed some of the concerns. Please continue leaving comments either below this blog post or for a more immediate response feel free to reach out to Mario, our community evangelist.

LinkedIn was mentioned in 4 separate articles in the March 17th issue of AdAge. While 4 of the pieces appeared in AdAge’s TalentWorks (a job hunting/recruiting focused supplement), the other piece appeared in the Digital section of the publication.

My favorite article by far is “The New Way to Network for a Job.” Erik Sherman, the reporter, interviewed Brenley Brotman of Symantec, one of LinkedIn’s Corporate Solutions customers. He also spoke to Wanda Anderson, another LinkedIn user.

Check out links to all 4 articles including links and a few quotes, which summarize the piece best can also be found below:

The Quick and the Defunct | March 17th, 2008

When it comes to finding new talent, Mr. Cantarella points to a favorite adage of Time.com Managing Editor Josh Tyrangiel: “Fish where the fish are.” So the company uses sites such as Craigslist, Facebook and LinkedIn, along with more traditional networking tools.

The Very Fine Line Online | March 17th, 2008

The fact is, the social networking sites can be wonderful tools for the workplace. If you are a new-business director and while searching Linkedin, you discover that your college buddy is now Director of Marketing at McDonald’s, I think you just found yourself a new best friend.

The New Way to Network for a Job | March 17th, 2008

The results are effective. “If I contact, say, 10 people on LinkedIn whom I’m interested in pursuing for a particular position in AutoTrader, I’d hear back from seven or eight of them,” says Rebecca Loughlin, a senior recruiter at AutoTrader.com. “With phone calls, even one [reply] would be considered good.

Symantec’s head of talent acquisition outlines specific examples of where LinkedIn works

Different networks serve different communities and uses. Mr. Coleman likens LinkedIn to an industry conference, whereas Facebook is a party situation, where you get to see people with their hair down. “Where LinkedIn is great, from our perspective, is [for positions paying] $75,000 or above,” says Symantec’s head of talent acquisition, Brenley Brotman. “If we wanted to do more entry-level, $30,000 to $50,000, some of those other sites are more effective to us.

And, Wanda Anderson, outlines the best way to benefit from LinkedIn | Use it!

To make social networking work, people on both sides of the search have to use it well. Individuals have to learn how to use the systems. Wanda Anderson, a marketing manager recently between positions, remembers being invited to join LinkedIn a year ago. “I didn’t understand what it was,” she says. Then her old position was eliminated, and she joined a traditional networking group and found herself getting one LinkedIn invitation after another. She’s trying to get past her novice standing. “You don’t understand what it means if you’re not an avid user of it.

It’s Time to Upgrade to You 2.0 | March 17, 2008

DEMONSTRATE DIGITAL PROWESS THROUGHOUT ANY JOB SEARCH – Find new ways to sell yourself. Describe case studies you’ve been part of. Have a website built and become active on LinkedIn and other professional social-networking sites. Creatives should have a DVD with examples of all forms of experience, including traditional media.

Well, I’ve tried to stay away from the blog for as far as I can, but Mario has been really bugging me about blogging for LinkedIn and announcing LinkedIn’s Company Profiles gave him the perfect opportunity to get me in front of the camera (see below). As you can see, we had a fun shoot yesterday where I give an overview of Company Profiles.

Check out a few examples of Company Profiles | eBay, Google, Yahoo!, Oracle, etc…

For those of you who don’t have time to go through the 3 minute demo below (and I can’t fault you on that), here’s a quick summary:

What are LinkedIn Company Profiles?
Starting now, you’ll be able to see over 160,000 profiles of companies on LinkedIn, ranging from Fortune 500 companies (e.g. eBay) to philanthropic organizations (e.g. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) as well as LinkedIn’s own Company Profile page.  Company Profiles on LinkedIn is a succinct overview of a company’s industry data in combination with LinkedIn data along certain key metrics. You’ll get a better picture of it as I show you a quick demo and an overview, after the jump.

Video demo (2:59 minutes)

If you’ve taken a quick look at the demo, I basically walked through some of the key components of Company Profiles, which I’m also going to outline below (with screenshots) for those who couldn’t catch the video.

Overview

1. Finding Company Profiles

The easiest way to access any company profile is stumbling upon it through individual profiles themselves. As you’re browsing any profile, look out for a logo right next to company titles, in any individual’s work history. Clicking through the highlighted company links will take you to the Company Profile directly.

So, keeping in mind the unwritten “rule of the LinkedIn blog”, which is insert an Adam Nash reference at every given opportunity in the blog. So, let’s start with Adam Nash’s profile.

Clicking on the company name (in this case, eBay, Inc.) will take you to the Company Profile page, which you can find here.

An alternative to navigating company profiles is also the Search box that you can find once you are on any company’s profile page.

Please remember, this is still in beta and we’ll be adding easier ways for you to access this information in the following weeks.

Once you’re on a company page you’ll notice two sets of modules, the set of modules on the left is about about relevant people information and on the right you can see some key company stats modules. Given below are more details.

2. Relevant People Information modules

The modules you see on the left pane of the Company profile are about professionals within the organization, highlighted and sorted by relevance and distance from You, in four key categories.

* People in your Network

The first module in this space shows you the people in your network who work at that company. As with all LinkedIn results, these are sorted by the number of degrees they are away from you within the LinkedIn ecosystem.

* New Hires

In many companies, especially fast growing companies such as ourselves (at LinkedIn), it’s always great to find out who’re the most recent hires and this module answers that question.

* Recent Promotions and Changes

Another question that I’d love to find an answer for are who’re the movers and shakers within my organization. This could be particularly helpful for large Fortune 500 companies and since the results are sorted by how close they are to you, the chances are you’ll always stumble upon peers you know well.

* Most Popular Profiles

The last module on the left pane, shows those individuals who’re in the News recently. As you can see the eBay examples show the President, two Senior Vice Presidents and Chief Marketing Officer among others.

3. Key Company stat modules

To the right of the relevance modules, you’ll be able to find two key information modules on the company, which are described below.

* Related companies

The first of the two company modules, surfaces relevant information about the career trajectory of the company’s employees. Not only does it show the companies they come from and go to, but also connectivity among professionals working at different companies.

* Key Statistics

The information you find in the key stats module is aggregated from non-personally identifiable data of LinkedIn users who are currently employed by this company. There are two modules within Key Stats that we surface. One is basic data on Industry, Type, Status, etc…, which we get from our partner Business Week while the second module has unique information culled from LinkedIn that hasn’t been available before. They range from Common Job Title, Top Schools to Median Age and Tenure within the company.

Related blogosphere coverage:

* TechCrunch | LinkedIn, Now for Companies

* CNET News | LinkedIn’s business directory goes live

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Have fun perusing profiles of companies from the mainstream to the Long Tail of corporate America’s ecosystem and stay tuned for updates as we make this more relevant for each LinkedIn user. As I said in the video, please continue nagging Mario by leaving a comment below. Keep those  comments coming in :)

Over the course of the last years there were several important features that we’ve brought to you. The past few months in particular has seen the rapid deployment of features such as these: Profile photos, Redesigned Homepage, etc… We also enabled better communication within your professional network with the introduction of  LinkedIn Status, one-to-one messaging, robust network updates, etc…

Today, I’m here to blog about a completely new product offering, a radically new way you can use LinkedIn for your business. Today, LinkedIn introduced Company Profiles, a new research tool that helps you find and explore companies that you might want to work for or do business with. Maisy Samuelson, my colleague from the product side, has blogged a quick video demo, which you should take a look at here.

Company Profiles are literally profiles for companies. From an engineering perspective, we started with a relatively simple prototype of recent promotions and hires, iterated and created static pages for several companies. We then launched our company standardization project, played with massive amounts of statistical data, improved our search engine, added analytical data platform, ran a whole bunch of SQL scripts and implemented several designs of a page – Phew! All in a day’s work! And here’s what the page looks like now, with all the bricks in place:

Most of the information we’ve surfaced in this beta iteration of Company Profiles is unique data you’d find valuable for anyone interested in researching, working with or working for a company.

From the initial concept till the public release it has been a long yet fun ride. And at the same time it’s just the start. Stay tuned – in the coming months we’ll be expanding company profiles to allow you to search for companies by location, industry, size, type and many more. Feel free to leave a comment or check out Maisy’s video demo on company profiles.