Linkedin Blog

This is a part of our continuing series on engineering and analytics at LinkedIn. If this isn’t your cup of Java, check back tomorrow for regular LinkedIn programming. Else, check out our Engineering Blog  for more. - Ed.

There are over 1 million groups on LinkedIn and millions of members join these groups every week. When working with this volume of data, we ran into an interesting problem: how can we rank group discussions so that the most “interesting” ones appear at the top? What algorithm could handle the huge stream of activity – new discussions, comments, likes, views, follows and shares – to produce an order that would work for active and inactive groups as well as for active and inactive members?

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to meet with the head of Plan Ireland – a global overseas development organization that supports children and families in developing countries. After a few conversations with their marketing team, we hit upon the idea of  “Calling for a Cause”, a philanthropic effort aimed at leveraging LinkedIn’s extremely talented inside sales teams to support Plan Ireland’s worthy cause.

The first telethon consisted of 15 members of our sales force calling 750 previous donors to see if they would consider reactivating their support. To keep it simple, when the team got someone live that was interested we simply forwarded the call to the Plan Ireland office or marked the contact for follow up. Our team’s efforts not only helped Plan Ireland update their records but these calls also had an important ‘hello’ factor in that those called reminded, and thanked donors for their previous support to Plan Ireland, thus reinforcing potential donor loyalty into the future.

Steve Jobs' speech at Stanford University's 2005 commencement was filled with lessons for how to live life and how to stumble and still succeed. "Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose," he told the graduates. And when he died last week, the 6-year-old video went viral.

LinkedIn wrapped up another phenomenal summer intern program!

As we head into our 3rd intern season, it seems like just yesterday when we first launched LinkedIn’s first intern program back in 2010.  It’s been our privilege to work with these very talented students each summer. Their energy and enthusiasm is infectious (see Intern Flash Mob), their contributions enormous.