LinkedIn DirectAds

Jack Chou Jul 15, 2008

As the world's largest and fastest-growing professional network, LinkedIn is a fantastic place for businesses of all sizes to reach professionals with targeted messaging.

That's why today we're announcing LinkedIn DirectAds, a new online product designed for LinkedIn members who want to market their business, product, or service to other members. While large brands and companies will be best served by contacting our sales team, DirectAds lets LinkedIn members purchase audience-targeted text advertising on the site for their businesses of any size. For example, maybe you're a tax accounting firm looking to reach young professionals, or you're a design agency looking to find potential new clients in key industries, or maybe you've just written a new book on a career or business topic. You can use DirectAds to get the word out to your target customers.

Using DirectAds, members can specify the audience that will see their ads (based on seven different criteria), write targeted messaging for their products, and pay by credit card - Premium Account holders even get 50% off. The whole process takes just a few minutes. We've opened up the product to a large number of our members, so you can try it out for your own business at https://www.linkedin.com/directads .

Like existing ads on our site today, DirectAds advertisements are intended to be non-obtrusive messages that accompany the overall experience of LinkedIn. Note that you won't see any additional ads with the introduction of this product and every DirectAds ad includes the advertising member's name and profile data, so you'll know who is trying to reach members like you.

We think that DirectAds will be a simple and valuable way for members to market their service, business, or product to the rest of the LinkedIn community. Please note that LinkedIn DirectAds is currently available to only U.S. members, but other than that feel free to try it out for yourself at https://www.linkedin.com/directads and send over any comments to feedback@linkedin.com.

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Search your LinkedInbox with ease

Chris Richman Jul 11, 2008

How many times have you thought to yourself? Wouldn't it be nice if I could search through my Inbox on LinkedIn. We are really glad to announce this much requested feature this week, close on the heels of the LinkedIn Group Search functionality announced by my colleague, Ben, a few days ago.

1. Where can I find LinkedIn Search?

Start looking along the horizontal navigation header on the homepage (see above screenshot)

You may notice this one-stop search drop-down menu also includes the ability to search within LinkedIn Groups, in addition to searching your Inbox.

2. Let's Search!

How about looking for any Inbox communication thread with the "developer" keyword in my Inbox. Remember this search will also produce results from your Inbox's Archives.

The greyed-out results are pulled from your Archive. So, you don't lose any communication you've received.

Feel free to leave your feedback, comments at the end of this post. We believe this will definitely help you navigate your professional life with far greater ease.

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LinkedIn Polls: Senator John McCain polls users on gas affordability

Elizabeth Reaves Jul 09, 2008

This is my first post on the LinkedIn Blog. I'm an associate product manager here at LinkedIn and I am excited to announce one of the early LinkedIn Polls on our site. This poll question is asked by Presidential Candidate, Senator John McCain -- his LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Senator McCain asks what has the most long-term potential to make gas affordable for Americans, a topic that's definitely on the top of voters' minds this general election. Thus far, over 2500 professionals on LinkedIn have given their two cents. Here's a chance to make your voice heard: join thousands of other professionals by answering Senator McCain's question and clicking on one of the choices within the poll below.   

Once you vote on the poll, you'll be taken to a page that not only shows you a summary of the up-to-the-minute results, but also displays a detailed breakdown of how certain types of professionals answered this question (for example, the segment below shows how results vary if you compare the responses of business owners, C-Level executives/VPs, managers, and general employees). The below results summary was taken at 2 PM Pacific, on July 8, 2008.

For those of you interested in knowing more, LinkedIn Polls allows professionals to conduct business and market research by tapping into the wisdom of the business crowd on LinkedIn. The product is currently in beta while we work with a number of early partners who want to use LinkedIn Polls to do research.  If you are interested in becoming a partner during this beta phase, click here to send us your contact information and a brief description of your company’s research objectives.  Stay tuned for more polls on the site, and in the future, the ability for everyone to "poll your network" and create, target, and publish polls on LinkedIn.

Feel free to leave a comment or two. Or better yet, experience LinkedIn Polls by answering the above question from Senator McCain or viewing the results page.

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Editor's Note: This is not an endorsement. We welcome participation from candidates of any party posing questions to our user community. We also encourage our users' active participation both with their answers and feedback.   

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Announcing LinkedIn's Searchable Groups Directory

Ben Guthrie Jul 08, 2008

We are thrilled to announce the launch of LinkedIn’s Groups Directory on Friday, July 11! With over 90,000 groups on LinkedIn, it was about time to make the complete list easily accessible by our members. The goal with this feature is to make it easier for people to find groups to join, and we think the directory goes a long way toward achieving that goal.

What is LinkedIn Groups?

Many professionals advance their careers and business goals by counting on industry and professional groups, alumni organizations, industry conferences and corporate alumni groups to help them make vital new business contacts. LinkedIn Groups offers extra features to group-based organizations to help their members stay in touch with one another and discover powerful new business contacts within their groups and beyond. (Read more in the FAQs.)

Product Details

• The Groups Directory is accessible from the left navigation as well as the search drop down in the upper right part of the page.
• Search results return groups that match based on either the group name or a keyword in the group description.
• Search results are sorted by group size with the larger groups appearing at the top.
• Groups may be filtered by category, including alumni, corporate, conference, networking, non-profit, professional, or other.
• If you choose not to list your group in the Groups Directory, we have a setting for group managers on the Edit Group Info page.
• To prevent abuse of the system, users may have up to 10 pending group requests at a time.

We are excited about the future of LinkedIn Groups and hope you will help shape that future by providing feedback to the LinkedIn Groups team: groups@linkedin.com or leave a comment at the end of this post.

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News Recommendation and Discovery Improvements

Jen Granito Jun 26, 2008

Following the announcement of LinkedIn News we regularly been shipping improvements and built on top of the existing functionality.  We are continuously adding companies that are able to see news as well as news queries that should be relevant for those companies. Additionally we are constantly adding new sources for which we pull, we have added news sharing, company discussions around news articles, and last week Armin Ahumada improved how you can recommend an article and Eishay Smith improved how we add syndicated feeds (such as RSS and ATOM) to our fetcher.

1. Recommendation Improvements

Almost everywhere that you see new, you will see a thumb’s-up.  There are three different states:

Grey = no one has recommended or commented on the article
Blue = someone within your company has recommended or commented on the article
Blue with orange rays = you have recommended or commented on the article.

The benefit to having these states is that it allows you to look at all of the news that is provided to you and scan for articles that your co-workers have engaged with and it helps you decide which articles you would like to take the time to read.

2. News Discovery

When users submit a new article to the site, we are paying attention to the source the article is from.  If we are not getting articles from that source already, we will check to see if the publisher has any syndication feeds that we can fetch news from.  If you are a blogger or a professional online journal in a niche category, it can be hard for us to find you. To start seeing your own content on LinkedIn organically, promote your blog or publication on LinkedIn by listing it as a website on your profile or share your blog posts with your company and connections by “Submitting a new article”.  On that note, we are doing our best to provide our members news of high quality so this does not guarantee news distribution on the LinkedIn, but it definitely won’t hurt :)

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LinkedIn Companion + Firefox 3 = Good Web 2.0 Karma

Brandon Duncan Jun 20, 2008

I'm sure everyone reading this post is cognizant of Mozilla's recent record breaking download day for the latest version of the Firefox 3 browser! Over 8.3 million downloads in the first 24 hours, a feat that will find mention in next year's edition of the Guinness Book of World records!

Our team was hard at work to deliver an updated version of our LinkedIn Firefox Companion that's now compatible with Firefox 3. We also took this opportunity to scale some new features and squash some minor bugs. Not only that, we're excited that we were one of the featured add-ons recommended by Mozilla.

Technorati Tags: firefox3, linkedin, linkedincompanion, mozilla

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Share News With Your LinkedIn Network From the Web

Taylor Singletary Jun 05, 2008

So you're reading an article on your favorite news site about an exciting new development in your field. It's crucial that your colleagues read and discuss this article. What if there was an easy way to share the article with your LinkedIn network?

In April, Jen and Eishay told you how to share an article with your LinkedIn network. Today I'm going to tell you another way you can use LinkedIn News Share.

For You

On sites that have implemented LinkedIn News Share, you'll see a link to share the content you are reading with your LinkedIn connections or networks. Sharing an article with your network will result in a Network Update telling your network where to read and discuss the article. Sharing it with your connections allows you to pick and choose who to send it to and provide a message describing why you think the content is noteworthy.

Sharing news with your network helps your colleagues and peers stay on the same page, sparking discussions on the topics that matter to your network.

For Content Providers

Adding a "Share on LinkedIn" link to your website or blog allows your users to share your content with their LinkedIn connections or networks. This gives your content legs: one user visits your site and can notify literally tens, hundreds, or thousands of others, driving relevant traffic back to your site.

Find out how easy it is to implement this link here.

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"LinkedIn Public Profile" now on display in the Yahoo! Search Gallery

Today, Yahoo! opened the doors to its Search Gallery, enabling its users to view and add applications built on the SearchMonkey platform.  Though the Gallery is still in beta, a handful of interesting and useful apps are already on display, such as the one labeled “LinkedIn Public Profile”, a light plug-in we created with a little help from our friends at Yahoo.

Starting today, visitors to the Gallery can add the LinkedIn Public Profile application to personalize their Yahoo! Search experience and render public profiles in a more useful and visually compelling format directly on the search results page. 

Before:

After:

As my colleague, Jack Chou, noted in a previous post (LinkedIn and the Yahoo! Open Search effort), LinkedIn is committed to helping you promote and control your personal brand online.  Your customizable public profile settings put you in full control over what information from your LinkedIn profile is made accessible to search engines and applications such as this one.  Currently, your profile data will not be presented in this new and rich format, unless you have claimed a custom public profile URL.                

Our participation in the Yahoo! SearchMonkey initiative is just one example of how LinkedIn supports open standards on the web and strives to help you enhance and expand your presence online to further your professional life. 

Send your Kudos to Jay Kreps, Jack Chou, Steve Ganz, Elliot Shmukler, and of course, the Yahoo! Search team!   

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LinkedIn News: Submit articles and find more RSS Feeds!

Eishay Smith Apr 18, 2008

Jen Granito

Since we announced LinkedIn News late last year, we have continually made improvements to enhance your user experience. A couple of the most recent changes include, sharing LinkedIn News and recommending LinkedIn News.

Today, Eishay and I would like to announce a couple more changes to the LinkedIn News experience that we have started rolling out from today. See below for a description and process flow of these two enhancements.

1. Submit an article on LinkedIn News

Here are the three simple steps to submit an article/blog post that you'd like to share with your colleagues or peers.

* Step 1: Click on the "Submit a new article" link on the LinkedIn News section

* Step 2: Submit a news article

* Step 3: Share a news article

2. More RSS feeds in your LinkedIn News

LinkedIn News always had this healthy mix of traditional media articles as well as blogosphere feeds. Starting this week, you should start seeing content from RSS feeds of blogs you have mentioned in your public LinkedIn Profiles.

How can I include my blog as LinkedIn News content?

Add those links to the "Website" section within your LinkedIn Profile and make it public. Here are the two simple steps to do exactly that:

1. "Edit my Profile" within the "Profile" tab

2. Edit "Websites" under "Additional Information" by adding your blog details

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Top 10 Company Profiles on LinkedIn (April 2008)

We launched our company profiles section almost a month ago and Mario just tells me that the Company Profiles blog post was one of the most viewed blog posts of the past year. We have also had enormous interest both from the blogosphere and mainstream media.

I thought it'll make a great follow-up post to give you a quick rundown of the company profiles that have been viewed most often since we launched. Let me clarify that we are continuously expanding company profiles for other companies, so if you don't see yours listed, please be patient. 

Given below is a countdown of the Top 10 most viewed Company Profiles on LinkedIn (as of April 2008).

General Electric Company (GE) is a diversified industrial corporation. Its Infrastructure segment produces jet engines, turboprop and turbo shaft engines, and related replacement parts for use in military and commercial aircraft; wind turbines; aircraft engine derivatives; gas and steam turbines, and generators; oil and natural gas compressors and turbines; diesel-electric... see more

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Learn more about "People You May Know"

Jonathan Goldman Apr 11, 2008

We've recently enhanced "People you may know" by expanding it to more users and providing a means for you to give us feedback about the quality of the recommendations. This feature has been around for almost a year and the goal is to suggest people you may want to connect to. You now have the ability to eliminate suggestions; this valuable feedback will aid us improving our algorithms and deliver you more relevant results.

Let me clarify that this feature is very targeted so not everyone necessarily has results. Also, it is still being rolled out and we are expanding the methods we use to compute results so please check back. Here's a quick rundown that will help you navigate this nifty LinkedIn feature:

1. Find: You'll notice that LinkedIn's "People you may know" is the first module that you'll find on the top right hand pane of your redesigned LinkedIn homepage showcasing three relevant recommendations of people you may know.   

2. Fine-Tune: The best part of the feature is that you can avoid seeing the same recommendations each time you log into LinkedIn, by identifying the recommendation as one of the following:

a. I don't know them
b. I don't know them well enough
c. Prefer not to connect
d. Other reason

3. See More: If you'd like to check out additional recommendations, click on
the "See More." This will lead you to a landing page with more results listed (if there are additional ones for you).

You can also import contacts from your preferred email provider or use the education and colleague reconnect features to look for past colleagues and classmates. Finally, you can try a name search in the search box near the top-right to look for particular individuals.

Hopefully you'll be delighted by some of the results! Feel free to leave comments or feedback at the end of this blog post.

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Tips and Tricks: Recommend LinkedIn News and Hyperlink Status

Chris Richman Apr 09, 2008

The last few months has seen a torrent of feature update announcements. Given the constant fine-tuning and tweaking of many of these features, we felt it may be a good idea to have a quick little feature snapshot each week, which could also work as a tips-and-tricks post. This week, I'd like to talk about a couple of subtle enhancements to features we launched recently.

1. Recommend LinkedIn News

Members can now recommend news articles to their company. This feature sends a network update to the company so everyone can read and discuss the article.

Of course, you can do the same from your LinkedIn News homepage as well, which contains a much longer list of News articles recommended to you.

2. LinkedIn Status now with hyperlinks (check Network Updates)

Just a couple of weeks ago we announced the ability for you to import your network updates into your personal feed reader with a personal RSS feed. We thought we'll enable you to share URLs within your network updates universe by allowing you to add hyperlinks to status. Now, if you include a link in your status, it will be clickable from Network Updates.

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Feel free to leave a question whenever you've a minute and I'll do my best to get back to you. If not, we'll unleash Mario, our community guy, on your comments!

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Your Network Updates' Personal RSS Feed

Chris Richman Mar 28, 2008

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.

Technorati Tags: linkedinnetworkupdates, linkedinrss, networkupdates, rss

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LinkedIn Mobile (iPhone) with better communication features

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.

Technorati Tags: iphone, linkedin, linkedinstatus

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LinkedIn News: Your company's professional watercooler

Jen Granito Mar 24, 2008

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.

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Now Companies too have profiles on LinkedIn!

Maisy Samuelson Mar 20, 2008

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 :)

Technorati Tags: companyprofiles, feature announcements, linkedin, maisysamuelson

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The Engineering Component of LinkedIn Company Profiles

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.

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Feature enhancements from Network Updates to LinkedIn News

Chris Richman Mar 15, 2008

This past week saw the introduction of a slew of feature enhancements that I'd like to cover briefly. In addition, stay tuned to news on a few of our partnerships and "LinkedIn News" feature updates, both of which you'll hear more about in the coming weeks. Here are the updates on the following couple of features:

1. Network Updates

     a. Expanded Connection Updates: Our connection updates will now tell you who your connections just connected to.  No more “Chris Richman has 2 new connections”… You’ll actually see the names of the connections.

     b. Mini-profile with actions: Those mini-profile popups you see on the site will now include several actions you can take on the profile such as sending a message. This will help create a communication loop so members can respond to profile updates, status messages, etc.  It’s built to take into account context, so we can show different actions for non-connections (invite, inmail, etc), and different actions depending on where you are on the site. Read more about it from Dhananjay's post.

2. LinkedIn News:

The news team updated your news freshness, which is always good. News articles for company, competitors, and industry are now sorted by date. This should improve the freshness of articles that appear in those three sections.

Next week, we've a video demo as well as an update on our API partnerships! Have a great weekend!
And, feel free to either leave a comment or feedback at the bottom of this post. Thanks!

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LinkedIn MiniProfile With Actions

Dhananjay Ragade Mar 14, 2008

Do you like seeing the network updates feed on the homepage, and seeing when your friends and colleagues have new photos, changed jobs, made new connections, or entered a new status? Have you wished that you could more easily send your contact a quick note to catch up, or more quickly see some basic information about him or her?  Then you’re in luck.

We’ve just released a new feature that works off the network updates feed on the homepage. We call it MiniProfile With Actions.

Now when you hover your mouse over a contact’s name in the network updates feed, you’ll see a MiniProfile pop up. The MiniProfile contains some basic information like your contact’s name, geographic location, and position. It also contains some links that allow you to more directly send your contact an email, or download his or her vCard.

So now when I see that Adam Nash's status says he "likes having the SxSW crowd back at work", I can hover the mouse over his name, and I get his MiniProfile:

So now I can send him a message asking him how the SXSW Interactive conference was, by clicking the "Send Message" link in the MiniProfile.

On the engineering side, this new features leverages a MiniProfile service we put in place a number of months ago for replicating a summary of profile data, along with some other data aggregation, in order to have a more horizontally scalable means of accessing profile data wherever it’s needed on other parts of the site.

We hope this new feature allows users to react to updates from their network and increase interaction with their contacts through LinkedIn.

Thanks to the other members of the team: Scott Schlegel (Web Development), Chris Richman (Product), Shirley Tan (QA), James Richards (Engineering), Boris Roussev (Engineering), and Brad Olcott (User Experience).

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LinkedIn and the Yahoo! Open Search effort

Jack Chou Mar 13, 2008

Today, Yahoo! announced their intention to aggressively support semantic web standards. At LinkedIn, we've been excited to work closely with Amit Kumar and others at Yahoo! in leveraging their Open Search platform.

In the coming months, Yahoo! search results will display LinkedIn Public Profiles in a richer and more compelling format. (example below)

What does it mean for the LinkedIn User?

LinkedIn is all about letting you control and promote your brand identity as a professional. We want to help you be found by others in ways that will help you professionally – whether it's reconnecting with old colleagues, getting contacted by business leads, or hearing about that next great career opportunity.

A key part of that is allowing our members to maintain customizable public profiles that are indexed by the top search engines – thus making sure that anyone looking for you via Google or Yahoo! search will find you. Yahoo! Open Search allows us to take this functionality to the next level. The more information you expose on your profile, the easier it will be for initiatives such as Yahoo's Open Search to display that when you're searched for.

And because you can control the details included in your public profile, you’re in complete control over the information that shows up here. In fact, your data won't be displayed in the above format unless you customize your public profile and claim your custom public profile URL. Go ahead and establish your online brand by fine-tuning your public profile settings on LinkedIn (links below)

Two easy ways to enhance your online brand

Modify your LinkedIn public profile settings

Claim your LinkedIn public profile URL

Furthermore, because we’re already publishing content using microformats like hResume, this type of rich data and functionality is available to anyone who wants to consume it. So we fully expect other search engines and tools to make use of machine-readable data already included in our public profiles.

At a broader level, this collaboration is another demonstration of our ongoing efforts to support open and innovative standards at LinkedIn. As the web evolves in new and exciting directions (whether they be Google OpenSocial and application platforms, data portability or the Semantic Web), our goal as a company is to evolve rapidly.

This post wouldn't be complete without mention of my colleagues: Jimmy Lim, Elliot Shmukler, Steve Ganz and Jay Kreps, whose contributions make this possible.

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LinkedIn Engineering | Status Feature

Sean Dawson Feb 29, 2008

With the introduction of the Status feature, I wanted to take a moment to discuss the engineering behind this launch. Since joining LinkedIn in September 2006, I've been helping evolve the communications system into a highly scalable messaging platform. This release is very exciting for us as it builds upon the foundation we've put in place, making features like Status possible.

One of the key value propositions of LinkedIn is being informed about what your network is doing.  This awareness can come in many forms: what questions are my connections asking?  What news is my network reading?  Propagating this information out to the LinkedIn network in a scalable manner is a difficult problem, but provides tremendous value to the end user.  In order to support  this going forward, we began to create a unified service that would provide network updates to users. 

We've converted our back end to use this new service, and late last year we used the new Network Updates Service to create a time-based feed of the events in your network.  We are currently processing over 40 million updates posted daily, which will continue to increase as the network grows.  For someone like myself who has recently graduated from university, this is a daunting number, and yet, it's why I continue to enjoy working at LinkedIn.

To handle this capacity, we use a cluster of ActiveMQ machines for distributed JMS processing, EHCache for fast in-process caching, and an efficient update procedure for when new updates are persisted.  We've designed the system to be scalable right from the start, horizontally partitioning across multiple databases as growth demands.

We will continue to provide new updates into your feed, and for those of you who do not visit the site regularly, you will be receiving these updates in a bi-weekly email so you can be kept up to date with the latest activity in your network. I would like to thank the team that worked on the Status feature, particularly Scott Schlegel (Web Development), James Lau (Engineering), and Qian Su (Engineering).

If you would like to hear more details our messaging platform, or engineering at LinkedIn in general, I will be speaking at some upcoming conferences along with Ruslan Belkin and Nicholas Dellamaggiore:

- SDWest, March 4, 7:00pm - 8:30. 
- JavaOne, May 3-6 2008
- Velocity, June 23-24, 2008, Burlingame CA

And, at the events particularly the SD West Birds of a Feather event, "There Will be Pizza"!

Come and meet us at SD West

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LinkedIn's new redesigned homepage with Status

Elliot Shmukler Feb 28, 2008

On many past occasions I've blogged about incremental changes being made to the LinkedIn homepage design, so I'm really glad to announce the complete redesign of the LinkedIn homepage and am going to to walk you through some of those changes in a demo that you can find below. Feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section of this blog post.

As I described in the demo, there are three parts to the homepage redesign:

1. System of Navigation

We've gradually transitioned away from a system of tabs to one of drop-down menus. Check out the horizontal top bar which exemplifies this the best. We've also created a consistent personal navigation bar vertically, which you use to manage the various elements of your professional network.

2. Profile Snapshot (with Status)

This component can be found right below the vertical personal navigation bar on the left. What this allows you to do is figure out how exactly you are presenting your professional identity, how up-to-date and accurate the information is and basically how complete your LinkedIn network is. This profile snapshot also contains the new Status feature that Chris demos here.

3. Customizable widgets panel

In addition to the above enhancements, LinkedIn'€™s redesigned home page includes several customizable modules that I've hinted at in prior blog posts. Currently there are three light-weight applications that allow you to more fully leverage the collective wisdom of your professional network. Stay tuned for more.

- The Answers module showcases what questions your network is asking, so that you can directly contribute to the network'€™s knowledge and perhaps ask a question yourself.
- The People module showcases the contacts you can make through your network (by using the connections of your connections).
- The Jobs module showcases the jobs and opportunities your network can help you with.

And, finally you'll notice that we've pushed out the navigation style across the length and breadth of LinkedIn so now there's a consistent look-and-feel as you traverse our site. Check out how the LinkedIn Groups page looks on LinkedIn currently.

Feel free to send us your feedback both through the feedback links that you can find on every page or leave a comment on this blog post.

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Blooper Reel: Those of you watching the video demo above may have noticed cameos from Adam, Minna and Ace as they walked past our conference room, but if you're a fan of the "World's Funniest Office Videos", check out the outtakes from my demo, taken at my expense. (Courtesy: Mario and Rob. Thanks, guys!)

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Announce your Status to your professional network

The blog has given me an opportunity to announce some really cool feature enhancements to the different ways you communicate on LinkedIn. Today, in addition to the new homepage redesign that Elliot demoed, I'd like to call out a few nifty features that'll most definitely enhance the way you relate to your professional network each time you log into LinkedIn.

Feel free to check out a quick demo below, of the three feature upgrades followed by a quick summary after the jump:

1. Simplified Inbox

In order to present you with the most appropriate messages in your LinkedIn Inbox, we've altered the logic so that your Inbox shows the five most recent actionable messages. We've also made it easier for you to take an appropriate action directly from the LinkedIn homepage (see demo). Of course, clicking on the Inbox icon takes you to a full-fledged Inbox page, yet again within the consistent look-and-feel that Elliot described earlier.

2. Customized Network Updates

We're also giving you, the user, more control over what types of network updates you're currently viewing on your homepage. By clicking to "Network Updates" ("Homepage Settings") under your "Accounts and Settings", you'll be able to choose: 

a. The kinds of updates you'd rather see on your homepage (photo updates, status updates, etc...)
b. The number of updates you'd like to see on your homepage (10, 15, 20, etc...)

3. Status

Most professionals love sharing anecdotes, tidbits about their professional lives with one another and thus far on LinkedIn it wasn't possible to do so. Starting today, you should be able to update your current status on a daily basis, which should provide you not only an additional way to communicate effectively with your immediate network but also  tap into the knowledge network you're a part of.

We do suggest status options such as "working on...", "traveling to...", "looking for advice on...", "looking for a job..." or "reading..."; but you also have the option to update status with any other professional tasks you're currently engrossed in. Imagine being able to let your network know that you're hiring or when you're planning a business trip or conference!

Status information will be broadcast to your connections as a network update and will also appear as a new element on your profile page. Given our focus on ensuring user privacy, you will have the option to control your status visibility. Additionally, LinkedIn members can choose whether they want to see the status in their network updates feed.

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Feel free to leave comments. Your feedback is much appreciated. And, let me know how I can do better on camera!

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Announcing LinkedIn Mobile (includes an iPhone version)

Brandon Duncan Feb 24, 2008

Well, this is the first time I'm blogging on our corporate blog and I've got to thank Mario for roping me into this. Today, I'd like to announce LinkedIn mobile for any Web enabled wireless phones that use the wireless application protocol (WAP). What that allows you to do is access LinkedIn from any mobile device ranging from your Blackberry to iPhone (more on that in just a second).

For those of you who can't wait to take LinkedIn with you on your mobile devices, here's how you access LinkedIn on your iPhone or other WAP enabled devices. All you have to do from your mobile device is log into

http://m.linkedin.com/

The beta product includes a version specially optimized for the iPhone and is available immediately in English, French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese with additional languages to follow.

So, here's a short video overview (3:36)  of LinkedIn mobile.

And, here's Jerry Luk, the lead engineer on LinkedIn mobile giving you a quick demo (4:36) of how to access LinkedIn on your iPhone. For those of you who don't have the time to check out the iPhone demo, feel free to check out five key benefits of using LinkedIn mobile (with screen shots below).

LinkedIn Features on your mobile device (as of Feb 24, 2008):

• Search LinkedIn profiles (including photos and bio) to help recall and connect with business acquaintances at events and conferences

• Research the common contacts they have with other professionals to help make real world referrals and introductions easier

• Invite professional acquaintances and peers you meet at events to LinkedIn with just their email address. Exchanging business cards is just not cool anymore!

• Receive regular Network update capabilities about your connections while on the go

• International versions currently launched include French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. More to follow.

We're also working on expanding the mobile LinkedIn feature set to encompass more of the LinkedIn goodness you can access on our site, including LinkedIn Answers and LinkedIn Experts. (Click through the above screen shots for a better view of LinkedIn Mobile).

Stay tuned for our announcements on the blog and feel free to leave a comment here with any feedback.

Quick Tip: Did you know you can create a shiny new LinkedIn web clip for your iPhone homepage using the + button. Click here to learn more.

Related coverage: Reuters, TechCrunch, Web Worker Daily, CNET/Webware, Mashable, ComputerWorld,  Silicon.com, CondeNast Portfolio, The Guardian, Information Week, ZdNet UK, Mobility Site, TUAW, Chicago Tribune, eWeek... and I'm sure there's more to come. Stay tuned.

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New version of LinkedIn's FireFox Toolbar

Lucian Beebe Feb 20, 2008

One of my first posts on the blog was to announce the Outlook toolbar v2.2 in May 2007. This time around, I'm here to announce the next version of the Firefox browser toolbar, which is used by more than 100,000 of you. So, what's new about this update you may ask. Well, we've updated support for the Info box in the latest versions of your favorite web mail including Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail, and Gmail (What is Info Box?). We've also updated support for the Jobs Insider for Monster, Hotjobs, Craigslist, CareerBuilder, Dice, and Vault.

For existing users of the toolbar these are bound to be welcome changes but for the uninitiated here are the benefits of using the Firefox toolbar. Isn't having access to your LinkedIn network as you browse the web good enough? 

You may have also noticed that in addition to looking up people instantly from any website and your web mail, the browser toolbar has a feature called the Jobs Insider. So, when all you job hunters view a job listing, the JobsInsider opens a side pane where you'll automatically see your inside connections to the company whose job you're looking at!

Still quizzical? Check out the FAQ section here.

Convinced? Download the latest version of the Firefox browser toolbar here.

We'd really love your feedback on the latest iteration of the toolbar. Feel free to either leave a comment on this post or email us at firefox_support@linkedin.com.

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The Long Tail of Professional Expertise

Adam Nash Feb 19, 2008

Two years ago, Chris Anderson launched a book that became an instant frame of reference for most modern online businesses.  Love it or hate it, chances are you have heard some reference to "The Long Tail" in relation to the evolving economics of Internet-based businesses.  (Chris continues to maintain his blog on the topic here: The Long Tail).

I'm not going to attempt to reproduce the full Long Tail 101 here on this blog.   The basic concept is fairly simple:

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and