While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications.

Although the API is now available for all, LinkedIn has already partnered with a select group of developers. Here are a few examples of their integrations.

TweetDeck

Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. You will be able to add a LinkedIn column to your TweetDeck, showing all the updates from your network that would normally be visible on the LinkedIn web page. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. If you want to filter the LinkedIn column to only show certain types of update (e.g. status updates, connections or profile changes), you will be able to manage this from the new filter panel which will appear when you click the column header.

Posterous

You can now add LinkedIn as an autopost site on Posterous. So when you update to Posterous, you’ll be able to update directly to your Status Message on LinkedIn. It doesn’t appear that it works the other way around.

Ribbit

Through Knx.to’s recently launched technology, cloud-based VoIP telephony service Ribbit Mobile will pull in the LinkedIn contact info and status updates from anyone who calls you on Ribbit. It will also pull in info from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other social media sites. The idea is to give a social context to all of your contacts, which is definitely useful information for both professional and personal contacts.

JobDASH

From the developers of TwitterJobSearch, comes JobDASH, which is an Adobe Air-powered Twitter and LinkedIn client that serves as a career management tool for IT professionals.t can be used to Track colleagues via LinkedIn, and track industry news. JobDASH also features real-time job listings that are posted on Twitter and cross posted from LinkedIn. You’ll be able to filter listings based on type of job.

Box.net

While Box.net co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie is not yet sure of eventual scope of the integration, it will enable users to take content from Box.net and share it with LinkedIn contacts and on their LinkedIn profiles. Box.net is doing this via its OpenBox platform. The long-term approach is to include LinkedIn data and details on our own users’ profiles (on Box.net) to make a richer experience.

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As rumors continue to swirl around LinkedIn’s possible IPO, the professional social network is steadily adding useful features that help transcend the platform’s technology into other applications.

LinkedIn recently launched two-way integration with Twitter and also rolled out a plug-in to pull in your LinkedIn contacts within Microsoft Outlook. And today, LinkedIn is opening up its API to start letting developers make applications that tap into LinkedIn’s social network.

While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search. So developers will now be able to embed LinkedIn search in other applications. The social network’s search engine was re-launched last year and has done over one billion queries in this year alone.

Over the past year, LinkedIn has made select business development partnerships with technology companies for integrations, such as IBM, Microsoft, Research In Motion, and Twitter. While these partnerships created additional channels for LinkedIn’s platform, the opening up of the social network’s API is no doubt going to expand its presence across the web, perhaps representing a new level of growth for the social network.

LinkedIn has already tested the API with several developers and applications are already going to be launching in the near future. Twitter, MySpace and Facebook client TweetDeck will be integrated with LinkedIn in its next version. From the client, you’ll be able to see a stream of updates from your contacts, view profiles of contacts and comment and message contacts directly from TweetDeck. Posterous, Box.net, and Ribbit will all launch LinkedIn integrations in the near future as well.

LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products, Adam Nash, told me that over the past year, the network has received 4,000 requests from developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications. Nash says that this is the first step for LinkedIn to become an open ecosystem and there are future plans for additional APIs to be released down the line.

50 million users strong, LinkedIn could expand its already powerful growth with development of third-party applications. It’s a no-brainer for LinkedIn to open up its API. As Twitter’s platform has shown, an open ecosystem produces innovative and sometimes, extremely popular, products around a product. And it doesn’t hurt to have a loyal developer community as well.

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Professional social network LinkedIn is showing a little Microsoft love today. In conjunction with the announcement of the beta of Microsoft’s Office 2010 at its Professional Developer Conference, LinkedIn and Microsoft have partnered to offer an add-on that integrates much of your LinkedIn contact information with your Outlook contacts.

The add-on to Outlook will provide professional and social context to any Outlook users everyday email experience. When you received an email from a contact who happens to be a member of LinkedIn, Outlook will show a collapsible pane that will show information on what the contact’s latest activity is on Linkedin.

So in Outlook, you’ll be able to see a picture of contacts (pulled from their Linkedin profile), who they have recently connected to on the network, and any status updates they’ve posted on the site. The add-on will also show you the most recent professional information about a contact, including the most recent job and city that he or she lives in. And if you aren’t connected with a contact on LinkedIn, you can easily invite him to connect within Outlook (but you cannot accept invitations yet; this feature will be included in the future).

The other bonus of the add-on is the synchronization between Outlook and LinkedIn contacts. Outlook will bring automatically consolidate information for existing contacts who are LinkedIn contacts and new LinkedIn contacts. Plus, you can send messages to a LinkedIn contact directly from Outlook. And if a contact in Outlook changes any contact information within LinkedIn, Outlook will automatically be updated too.

The add-on will ship with Microsoft 2010, but can be downloaded to work with Outlook 2003, and 2007. While social network has a Outlook toolbar that has been available for some time, this appears to be the first major partnership between LinkedIn and Microsoft.

LinkedIn’s Director of Product Development, Elliot Shmukler says that the fundamental idea behind the product is to bring the value of LinkedIn to where professionals do their work and Outlook has a fundamentally professional userbase. LinkedIn also partnered with IBM’s Lotus Notes and Xobni, providing a similar integration. But what about Google Apps? Shmukler declined to comment directly on a potential partnership but did say that there will be future integrations with additional email clients in the near future.

The past few weeks have seen a few key partnerships for LinkedIn. The connection with Microsoft is a huge, considering the widespread user of Microsoft Outlook in professional environments. LinkedIn also recently launched integration with Twitter, enabling Tweets to be sent from LinkedIn’s platform and more.

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Did LinkedIn more than double its U.S. visitors in October? A casual glance at the latest comScore data makes it look that way, with LinkedIn shooting up to 20 million unique visitors in October, 2009, from 9 million in September, 2009. The new estimate puts LinkedIn ahead of Twitter, which saw a decline of U.S visitors last month to 19.2 million.

Of course, LinkedIn didn’t really all of a sudden have a growth spurt in October. Rather, comScore was previously under-counting its reach. Now it does a better job of measuring Web usage at work, which apparently is where about half of LinkedIn’s users check in. It makes sense, since LinkedIn is a professional network and you are more likely to be looking for contacts at other companies during work hours.

While the fish-shaped chart above suggests that LinkedIn is now about as popular in the U.S as Twitter (or at least Twitter.com), the two are complementary. On Tuesday, LinkedIn gave users the ability to link to their Twitter accounts so that their Twitter stream shows up as status updates in LinkedIn as well. Since Tuesday, LinkedIn has witnessed a 25 percent increase in status updates. Long live the stream.

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Professional social network LinkedIn has long had a feature that lets users update their status on their profile. But it’s plainly obvious that LinkedIn users don’t nearly use the status feature for mass communication as frequently as they use Twitter or Facebook for the same purpose. In fact, I surveyed a sampling of LinkedIn users who avidly use the site for networking but never update their status on their profile. Many didn’t even know that LinkedIn had a status update feature. Starting tonight, LinkedIn will integrate with Twitter, letting users sync their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to broadcast LinkedIn status updates on Twitter and vice versa in real-time. So how does this work?

LinkedIn will now allow you to update your status on your LinkedIn profile and then share the message automatically to Twitter. To enable to enable the cross posting feature, you just need to click the new Twitter box under your Network Updates box on the homepage and sync with your Twitter account (via oAuth).

The integration works the other way as well. You can also share Tweets to your LinkedIn profile from Twitter or any other client by adding the hashtag “#in” or “li”. As part of the setup process on LinkedIn, you can choose to either send all your tweets or select tweets that have the hashtag “in” from Twitter back to LinkedIn as a status update. You can also import your Twitter stream into your profile now, which is also an op-in feature. So your profile will show a “Recent Tweets” section that will include a real-time stream of your Tweets. The ability to show your Twitter stream in your LinkedIn profile no doubt provides a compelling social media context to your professional CV. As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone says in a video about the harmonious integration, “the business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important.” He adds, “The persona they create for themselves on the web is part of their resume.” Stone also said LinkedIn and Twitter are as complimentary as “peanut butter and chocolate” (hence the logo).

It makes sense for LinkedIn to integrate with Twitter considering that its own status update feature isn’t tremendously popular. The ability to Tweet directly to your LinkedIn profile will add a good amount of fresh content and perhaps new traffic to the site for social purposes as well as for professional interests. And perhaps the Twitter integration will breathe new life to LinkedIn’s status update feature. AIM and MySpace also made similar moves by adding the two-way sync with Twitter. As my colleague Erick Schonfeld eloquently wrote recently, LinkedIn, like other social media sites and networks, is realizing that it’s better to swim with the stream than against it.

The odd man out in this announcement appears to be Facebook, who has yet to add Twitter syndication to its functionality for all users. It would also make sense for LinkedIn to sync with Facebook, but LinkedIn’s co-founder and VP of product strategy Allen Blue says it something that the site “may consider in the future.”

Blue says that for now, LinkedIn is concentrating its efforts on Twitter thanks to the “great amount of business conversations” that are taking place on the microblogging platform. But LinkedIn’s other founder and executive chairman Reid Hoffman, who recently joined VC firm Greylock as a partner, was an angel investor in Facebook, so it would make sense LinkedIn will play nice with Facebook in the future.

When asked about the possibility of a URL shortener being added to LinkedIn’s status update feature (which would be useful given the integration with Twitter), LinkedIn spokesperson Kay Luo said that would make a lot of sense and could be a possible addition in the future. Luo declined to say whether LinkedIn will be creating their own URL shortener or integrating with one of the billion other shorteners out there.

LinkedIn is no doubt growing, reaching 50 million users a few weeks ago and innovative features like this should only add to the social network’s popularity. And as Twitter continues to globally, this will compliment LinkedIn’s considerable international presence.

It’s important to note the Twitter feature will be gradually rolled out over the next 24 hours to all LinkedIn users.

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A not so well thought-out feature – or defect – allows any LinkedIn user to indicate the company they work for has acquired, merged with or become a division of another company without any third-party verification whatsoever. Worse, when a user falsely claims company A has e.g. purchased company B, this will actually show up on company B’s public profile as such. Needless to say, this could cause quite some confusion.

For examples, head on over to the LinkedIn profiles of Yahoo! and Google, which are both apparently owned by a Pakistani web hosting firm with about 10 employees. Or take a look at the public LinkedIn profile of Internet commerce giant eBay, which is seemingly a subsidiary to collector community and marketplace operator Colnect, whose founder and sole employee Amir Wald tipped us about the ‘feature’.

Update: fixed now

The only thing you need to make false pretenses about the relationship of a company with another, is indicate you work there as well as obtain full access to the profile settings – I couldn’t make Google the parent company of say, Skype, even if I pretended to work there because I don’t have a valid e-mail address and/or the necessary rights.

But you can definitely make any company you have editing rights to the owner or subsidiary of any other company without as much as a hitch.

All you need to do is go to the part of the LinkedIn website where you can edit a company’s profile and click on the ‘Related Companies’ menu item. There, you can indicate your employer – true or not – is a Division, Subsidiary, Parent, Acquisition or Merger of any company that has a profile on the popular business social network.

Always dreamed of owning Apple or Microsoft? Here’s your chance to pretend you do, and it’ll take you only about 5 seconds.

We can’t be sure how long this has been possible already, but we’ve contacted the company about it, so we expect to see a quick fix to this anomaly.
Update: fixed now

In the meantime, please behave yourselves. Okay? Okay.

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LinkedIn’s founder Reid Hoffman will be joining Greylock Partners as a partner but will continue to hold the role as executive chairman of LinkedIn. Hoffman tells us that he will be shifting his angel investing under Greylock Partners, where he will be a partner.

Greylock has also closed Greylock XIII, a $575 million fund, which will be used to invest in and support promising enterprise and consumer software, services and infrastructure ventures. Hoffman said that Greylock was the right fit because of the relationships he had with the partners, and the angel investing presence of the VC firm. Hoffman said that Greylock and his interests in funding early stage companies were aligned. He adds that he will continue to work full-time for LinkedIn.

Greylock also led LinkedIn’s series B funding round, which totaled $10 million. Hoffman has been one of the more prolific angel investors in Silicon Valley, investing in Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Ning, Six Apart and Zynga. Prior to LinkedIn Hoffman served as executive vice president at PayPal, where he was a founding board member. We are told that Greylock will not be taking on Hoffman’s current portfolio, only his future investments.

LinkedIn has been steadily growing, recently hitting 50 million users. Hoffman recently changed the guard at the company, with Jeff Weiner taking the helm as CEO in June. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman recently told us that he’s not in any rush to go public. The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable for the past years.

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LinkedIn has hit 50 million users, according to a blog post today, growing from 45 million users two months ago. And according to the latest comScore data, LinkedIn is steadily growing in terms of unique visitors. For September, LinkedIn had 9 million unique visitors in the U.S. compared to 8.7 million unique visitors in August. But it appears that LinkedIn’s growth is mainly attributed to a burgeoning international user base. Worldwide, LinkedIn grew from 18 million unique visitors in July to 20 million unique visitors in August.

The network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international, with 11 million users in Europe and 3 million users in India, which is seeing the fastest rate of adoption of LinkedIn. Weiner added that it took just 12 days for the network to accumulate the latest million users.

Founder Reid Hoffman recently changed the guard at the company, with Weiner taking the helm as CEO in June. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman recently told us that he’s not in any rush to go public. The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable for the past years.

Rumors have been flying around about LinkedIn potentially buying German social network Xing, which Hoffman told us that this wasn’t happening. But if LinkedIn is growing so fast in Europe and other international markets, perhaps they don’t need Xing to add more users.

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So you don’t need a bunch of words from me, just go to the jump and watch our final backstage interview of the conference where Hoffman talks about whether LinkedIn will buy Xing and whether it’ll file to go public this year.

Also, Hoffman names the three other tech companies he thinks can price pretty much whenever they want. (And lucky him, he’s an investor in two.)

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But unlike Facebook and LinkedIn which exist as two totally separate networks, Radiusly wants to integrate its service with Twitter. Users will be able to publish an update they leave on Radiusly to Twitter (and Facebook, as well). But the key selling-point is that in the Radiusly environment you can also do much more, such as have a professional profile, resume, sample works, and photos.

Ideally, a Radiusly users would be someone who loves the concept of Twitter, but wants to be able to maintain their work-related tweets in a separate environment, where they could also share other professional information. As more and more companies wake up to the idea of using Twitter as a means of communication, a service like this could be compelling to them.

Of course, there is a lot of competition out there for the business Twitter market. Aside from startups like CoTweet, (TechCrunch50-alum) Yammer, and Blellow, Radiusly could be looking at both LinkedIn and Twitter itself making more moves into this arena shortly. We already know that Twitter is gearing up some professional tools for businesses to use, but whether those will be things similar to what Radiusly offers, no one is sure yet. Meanwhile, if LinkedIn wanted to, it could easily make itself Twitter-centric. It doesn’t appear that they are going to do that, but you never know.

Radiusly plans to using a subscription/freemium model, offering some services for free, while charging a subscription fee for others. There will also be sponsored search listings, job listings, and banner ads to bring in revenue.

CEO Chris Sel and VP of Business Development Adarsh Pallian presented it today at the conference.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire

RS: I think you’re aiming at the right target, but you hit the wall. Brands tell me they won’t want to advertise on Twitter. You’re just not there yet, I’m not sure why.

Q: Reid your thoughts?

RH: In a rare position, I agree with much of what Robert was saying. The real key is how do you exchange information on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, not that they need a new way to search for some of this.

DC: I agree with Robert and Reid, I don’t really get why I would go there. I kept trying to figure it out, to be fair when Twitter first launched I didn’t get it either, now I work there.

C: I gotta be Simon Cowell too. I can’t see why someone would need this.

Images:

Video:

Other Coverage:
TC50: Radiusly says companies should forget Twitter, microblog with us instead VentureBeat.

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According to comScore, LinkedIn had 16 million worldwide monthly unique visitors and 331 million page views in June 2009, up from 7.7 million and 114 million a year ago, respectively.

The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last (2008) round of financing, and says they’ve been profitable for 2+ years.

LinkedIn has gone through numerous changes at the CEO role with founder Reid Hoffmanchanging the guard once again in June of this year after yet another change in December of 2008.

The company is a strong 2010 IPO candidate. Hoffman told us earlier this year “we can go public any time we want to.”

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But they are still serious about gunning for the LinkedIn crowd and all those monetization opportunities (jobs, ads and a heck of a marketing pool for WSJ subscriptions). They’ve been working on a new social network, to be called WSJ Connect, we’ve confirmed. And instead of building it internally, like they did with WSJ Community, they’ve enlisted the help of another arm of parent company News Corp. – Slingshot Labs. And yes, they call it “LinkedIn Killer” internally.

Slingshot Labs is the R&D arm of News Corp. and works on digital products. Their first product was Daily Fill, which launched earlier this year. They also built the MySpace Events product that we covered in March. They operate fairly independently, have their own funding and 40-50 staff, according to one person familiar with their operations.

WSJ Connect is still in the planning/conceptual stages, says one source, but there is “strong interest” to move the project forward. Importantly, it would leverage the WSJ brand but would be a separate property and unencumbered by the need for a paid subscription to the newspaper.

Conceptual screenshots of the product are apparently floating around Slingshot, the WSJ and MySpace. We’re trying to track them down.

Absolutely no one responded to our requests for comment. Luckily, lots of ex-MySpace employees are happy to talk.

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There is an IBM commercial that pokes fun of people who spend time on social networks in the workplace (see below). It shows a young, hip guy who brags about having “826 friends” and explains to an older boss-lady type that he “can find anyone.” So she says she needs a team of international finance experts who know merger arbitrage, speak Cantonese and can start on Monday. “I don’t have any friends like that,” admits the underling.

Well, if he was on LinkedIn, he might be able to impress his boss. The online business network earlier today quietly introduced a People Search beta. Once you opt in, a guided navigation panel appears on the right every time you search showing the breakdown of results across 11 different facets, including current company, relationship to you, location, industry, and whether or not they are looking for a job. By checking the appropriate boxes, you can narrow your search quickly and find who you are looking for.

A search for “mergers,” for example, brings up 108,345 results. But when I select people at least two connections away from me, who live in the Bay area, and are “potential employees” that narrows it down to 24 results. Since LinkedIn contains a lot of highly-structured data, it knows that “CEO” is a title and that “Cisco” is a company, so it can generate people results accordingly. Results in the guided navigation column are ranked and generated dynamically, according to how many results there are for any given field (a number in parentheses tells you how many results there are for each refinement). So it tells you where to look essentially

LinkedIn started improving search last Thanksgiving, and since then has seen searches double to more than 100 million queries a month. About a third of all visitors do a search, and it is increasingly becoming an important way to navigate the site. Better search means better engagement with the site, something LinkedIn could use. According to comScore, U.S. unique visitors declined from 8 million last March to 7.1 million in June. Maybe this will help.

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Unfortunately, because these markets are trading shares of private companies, buyers and sellers are often left in the dark as to the worth of their stock. SharesPost, a private equity market that’s currently operating in public beta, is looking to help: the site has launched a publication platform for analyst reports meant to complement its equity market. And it’s offering a free two month membership to TechCrunch readers, which you can sign up for here.

As a teaser for what’s available on the platform, the site has shared two valuation reports on some of the world’s biggest social networks: Facebook and LinkedIn. You’ll want to check out the full reports here and here to read the full analysis and methodology (you may have to register).

Facebook
The report concludes that Facebook has an approximate valuation of between $3.1 billion and $6 billion, using three different methods of analysis. This is in line with the recent price we’ve been hearing on the secondary market, which pegged the valuation at around $3 billion. But it’s well short of the $10 billion valuation Facebook earned with its most recent funding round.

Likewise, using another method that guages Facebook’s value based on the performance and valuation of other companies in the tech space, the report estimates that Facebook should be worth $4.2B.

As a final measure of the social network’s worth, the report uses the most recent social network transaction, which was AOL’s $850 million acquisition of Bebo in early 2008. This valuation was around 17x Bebo’s 2008 revenue and 7.1x its 2009 revenue. The report uses the same multiples based on Facebook’s estimated 2009 revenue to generate a $3.15 billion valuation.

The report discounts the $10 billion valuation of Facebook from the recent Digital Sky Technologies investment, citing the fact that this price was for preferred shares. Instead, the report says we should pay more attention to the common stock valuation: DST offered to buy an additional $100 million of common stock valued at an estimated $6 billion, though the transaction has not yet been made.

LinkedIn
Another report uses similar methodology to measure the value of professional social network LinkedIn, concluding that the company is worth around $1.4-$1.6 billion. This is in line with the company’s $1 billion valuation from its funding round a year ago.

Using a steady-state growth valuation, the report projects that LinkedIn should be valued between $1.64B and $1.42B. Again, this is very dependent on revenue predictions: the Bull cases estimates that LinkedIn will have revenues of $460 million by 2014, while the Bear case uses $380 million for the same year.

As with the Facebook study, the LinkedIn report uses the Bebo acqusition to generate a valuation (which I doubt is particularly accurate given the very different natures of the sites). By this metric, LinkedIn’s projected revenue of $210 million for 2010 would yield a valuation of $1.49 billion.

SharesPost will continue to offer other reports submitted by third party firms in its marketplace. Of course, the majority of these research reports will not have had access to the actual numbers driving these private companies, so all analysis has to be taken with a grain of salt. No matter how detailed a report is, if its original assumptions about a company’s revenue prospects are off the mark, then any subsequent numbers will be too. That said, these reports are certainly better than nothing — even if the absolute numbers may be incorrect, the logic is usually sound.

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Today German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt published an interview [GER] with Xing CEO Stefan Groß-Selbeck (who recently replaced founder Lars Hinrichs), and he revealed a couple of interesting tidbits of information about the future direction of his company (find a horrible, Google-translated version of the full interview in English here).

Talking in broad strokes, Groß-Selbeck said 3.5 million of the 7.5 million Xing members are based out of Germany, Austria and German-speaking Switzerland. This isn’t really that surprising, given the background of the company. But the interview also marks the first time a Xing representative publicly (albeit indirectly) admitted losing in the USA and China.

Groß-Selbeck said he rather sees Xing’s future in those countries where the company has opened offices: Spain, Italy and the rapidly growing web market of Turkey. This statement was followed by him dodging a question about Xing’s previous plans to enter the US and China (he specifically responded that the focus lies on said countries and Xing plans to double its German user base in the next years). In other words, Xing seems to have stopped thinking about expanding into those regions for the time being.

My guess is LinkedIn never really feared the Germans entering their home market anyway, as a) almost no American really knows Xing, b) about half of LinkedIn’s 42 million members live in the US, c) coffers are filled to the rim and d) a $1 billion valuation is sure to let all key employees sleep soundly (Xing’s current market cap at the Frankfurt Stock Exchange: $220 million).

Google Trends shows that LinkedIn outclasses Xing in global traffic, too:

But Xing backing up in the US and China isn’t necessarily good news for LinkedIn. Their strategic decision won’t make it easier for LinkedIn to gain market share in said European countries where Xing already boasts a strong brand name and position. Here, LinkedIn is in for an uphill battle, which may take years to win (especially as Groß-Selbeck also said in the interview he intends to boost the number of employees from 240 to 360). And China has no shortage of business social networks either (Tianji, Wealink [CN] or Alibaba’s Ren Mai Tong to name just a few).

LinkedIn is currently available in four languages (English, Spanish, French and German), with more to come soon. The only office outside the US is located in London. In Europe, LinkedIn is particularly strong in Belgium, Holland, France, Great Britain and Denmark). Traffic in China is negligible for both LinkedIn and Xing.

Quick note:
German is my mother tongue, which means I didn’t have to rely on the Google translation linked to above when writing this posting.

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The hiring of Weiner as President was clearly an interim move, and we predicted he’d move into the CEO role sometime this year: “The addition of Weiner is also quirky, and may explain the changes. Weiner was likely expecting a CEO role as his next job. He’s now second to Hoffman. Perhaps the company is using the interim period to see how he can handle himself leading the company. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Weiner take the CEO job at LinkedIn sometime in 2009, or else leave the company.” It turns out that is exactly what happened.

LinkedIn continues to roll. They are the fifth most valuable social network according to our recent model. The site attracts over 15 million monthly unique visitors (Comscore worldwide, April 2009), up from less than 7 million a year ago, and has 42 million registered profiles. They’ve been ebitda profitable since last year and say they plan to be cash flow positive this year. In February, Hoffman told me “We can go public any time we want to.”

And Weiner agrees, telling me today that their current plan to to build an independent public company, with three key revenue sources: premium subscriptions, corporate solutions and advertising. To date the company has raised over $100 million. The last round, a year ago, valued the company at just over $1 billion.

Hoffman will stay with the company, becoming the executive chairman. This is a full time exec role, he says, not just a board of directors seat. For his part, Weiner has already managed day to day operations of the company. Hoffman says he has done “an exceptional job leading the company.”

It was just a year ago that we broke the news of Weiner’s departure from a troubled Yahoo. Weiner first joined Yahoo when former CEO Terry Semel took charge in 2000 and was one of the top execs when he departed, running the Network division (which included Yahoo’s home page, mail, search and media properties). Former Yahoo president Sue Decker gave him a nice sendoff when he resigned. Prior to joining LinkedIn Weiner was an EIR at both Accel Partners and Greylock Partners.

Here’s the full press release:

LinkedIn Names Jeff Weiner Chief Executive Officer
Co-founder Reid Hoffman continues as Executive Chairman

Mountain View, CA —June 24, 2009— LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, today announced that Jeff Weiner has been named LinkedIn’s chief executive officer and appointed to the board of directors. Reid Hoffman will remain focused on LinkedIn in his day-to-day role as founder and executive chairman.

Since joining LinkedIn as interim president in January 2009, Weiner has overseen all operations and played a defining role in developing and executing the company’s strategy to address the accelerating demand for LinkedIn’s products and services on a global basis. “Working closely with Reid and the team over the past six months exceeded all of my expectations coming into the company,” said Weiner. “I couldn’t be more excited about our progress to date, and the opportunity ahead of us.”

“LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals,” said Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman, LinkedIn. “Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together.”

In the past year, LinkedIn has achieved records across virtually all key operating and financial metrics, most recently exceeding 42 million global members. LinkedIn has an established business model with three lines of revenue, including premium subscriptions, corporate solutions and advertising. The company operated profitably in 2008 and is expected to be profitable in 2009. LinkedIn has secured more than $100 million in funding from some of the world’s premiere investors.

Weiner brings more than 14 years of consumer web experience to the position. Prior to joining LinkedIn as interim president, Weiner was executive in residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. He had previously held key leadership roles at Yahoo!, most recently serving as executive vice president of Yahoo!’s Network Division with responsibility for Yahoo!’s consumer web product portfolio, including Yahoo!’s Front Page, Mail, Search and Media products. In addition to LinkedIn, Weiner serves on the boards of DonorsChoose.org and Malaria No More. For more information, please see Jeff Weiner’s LinkedIn profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffweiner08.

About LinkedIn
LinkedIn takes your personal business network online, giving you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful professional network. Currently, over 42 million professionals are on LinkedIn, representing all five hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as a wide range of household names in technology, financial services, media, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, fashion, and numerous other industries. LinkedIn is backed by world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, the European Founders Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, Goldman Sachs, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and SAP Ventures.

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- Only two CEOs have Twitter accounts.
- 13 CEOs have LinkedIn profiles, and of those only three have more than 10 connections.
- 81% of CEOs don’t have a personal Facebook page.
- Three quarters of the CEOs have some kind of Wikipedia entry, but nearly a third of those have limited or outdated information.
- Not one Fortune 100 CEO has a blog.

Quite frankly, I think this is actually a good thing. Top execs of Fortune 100 companies in my view can do much more harm to themselves and the organizations they represent using social media the wrong way, and I haven’t seen that many CEOs of any size and type of company do it the right way. It’s what social media gurus and other experts are there for!

Thank God, I’ve never had to work for a Fortune 100 company, but if ever do I’ll be damned if I’m going to befriend and send Zombie bites to the head honcho on Facebook or send him or her direct messages over Twitter if I’m looking for a raise.

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Industry white papers, in general, are dull reading—unless you need a piece of information in one of them to do your job. Then you’ll pay almost anything (i.e. expense it) to get your hands on the white paper you need. Sometimes companies produce white papers and give them away for free, but they have a hard time finding the professionals who might be interested in whatever narrow topic the paper covers.

Enter LinkedIn. It knows what industry you work in and your job title, making it easy to guess what kinds of white papers you might actually be interested in. The business networking site is testing a new feature that turns white papers into ads and presents them to the narrow group of professionals most likely to want to read them. LinkedIn members can get white papers for free, and in return sponsors get qualified leads.

A few hours ago, CEO Reid Hoffman sent out a Tweet saying that he “downloaded my first whitepaper from Linkedin.” He linked to this white paper from VMware and Intel titled “VMware vSphere™ and Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 Series: Delivering the IT Infrastructure of Tomorrow – Today.” (You can only see it if you are signed in).

Before letting you download the paper, it asks for your contact information and whether you “have a budgeted project.” In other words, the price of the white paper is that you basically agree to be contacted by the company. This is standard practice on company-run sites and sites like IDG and Bnet where they distribute their own white papers, but it seems like they will have better luck finding takers on LinkedIn.

I contacted Hoffman to ask if this is a new feature. He responded via e-mail:

Yes, it’s a new feature in our advertising program. Essentially: Linkedin is where professionals search for people and information to accomplish business tasks. As such, whitepapers are valuable information for professionals in particular jobs and doing specific tasks. So, Linkedin has deployed an initial system for matching whitepapers to professionals that we will be further developing over the next couple of quarters.

If someone downloads a white paper on VMware and Intel, is that worth more than someone clicking on an ad? It certainly is a bigger commitment. LinkedIn expects to get $40 to $100 per lead. Soon LinkedIn will put up a white paper directory, and LinkedIn users will be able to spread them viraly by sharing them with their network.

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We’ve now remodeled social network valuations based on current user numbers and Facebook’s most recent $10 billion valuation. The results are dramatically different.

Based on the original year-old model, if Facebook was worth $15 billion (their then-current valuation), MySpace, with far more U.S. users, was worth nearly $20 billion:

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.

The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).

We’ve then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a “weighted average” based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.

We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.

Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace’s value.

The new model takes into account the dramatic rise of Facebook usage over the last year, the massive recent decline in MySpace usage, and less dramatic changes in the other social networks. We’ve also modeled out the various valuations with the old Bebo ($850 million) and LinkedIn ($1 billion) valuations as pivot points. We’ve also added Twitter to the list just for kicks.

The bottom line: If Facebook is worth $10 billion today, MySpace is worth just $6.5 billion. Bebo is worth $1.8 billion, Twitter is worth $1.7 billion and LinkedIn is worth $0.8 billion. Facebook also accounts for 37% of all social networking value points in our model. Another way of saying this: If Facebook is worth $10 billion, the value of the entire social networking industry is $27.1 billion.

Lots of charts and graphs below. The full model is here if you want to look at all the data (I recommend zooming unless you have super vision). Thanks to TechCrunch intern Dan Romero for running the new model.

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How quickly they grow. Remember when Twitter was just a little pipsqueek, with less than 10 million monthly unique visitors to its site worldwide? That was back in February, 2009. Fast-forward to April, and Twitter’s U.S. visitors alone reached 17 million. Now comScore has released its worldwide numbers and it estimates Twitter’s global unique visitors in April, 2009 was a whopping 32 million, up from 19 million in March, 2009.

To put that in growth into perspective, Twitter has just passed Digg (23 million), LinkedIn (16 million), and the NYTimes.com (17.5 million) in monthly unique visitors, as counted by comScore. And comScore only measures the number of people who visit Twitter’s Website, not the millions more who send and read tweets via their phones, desktop apps, or other Websites. Twitter.com is also now bigger than Bebo and Friendster, for what it is worth. Who will it pass next?

Its getting so big that its growth rate is beginning to temper. In April, Twitter added 13 million visitors, which is more than the 9 million it added in March. Its month-over-month growth rate, however, slowed to 68 percent from 95 percent the month before. Still, if it can keep adding 10 million global visitors a month, it will easily pass 50 million this summer and 100 million by the end of the year. No wonder everyone from Facebook to Google is looking over their shoulders.

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Imagine if you wanted to update one piece of information on all of them — like I recently had to do with a job change. That’s a lot of work for such a minor tweak. But if you don’t do it across the board, there will be incorrect information about you out there on the web. Information that is always just a search away.

Sure, there are calls for profile standards, and even some services that promise to update your information across multiple networks in one fell swoop — but let’s be honest, the only way you’re ever going to get a unified profile, is if one of the aforementioned services gets so big that it becomes the de-facto standard. Facebook is getting closer to that than anyone else with over 250 million users and rising, but Google may have well as have taken a crowbar to its knees today.

By adding its own profiles to search results on Google for names, Google has created yet another profile that we need to maintain. While that’s good for Google — Google Profiles have been around for a while, but no one used them — it’s more work for us, and seems to all but ensure that one network will not rule them all.

And we can all say that we’re going to drop all networks besides the one we use the most, but we won’t. For most people, the social graph is different on each of them, and there’s some reason to stick around there. If nothing else, it’s more of a pain to remove yourself from a service than it is just not to update your profile anymore. I can’t even begin to imagine how many profiles I have out there that haven’t been updated in a year or more.

And even if we did drop all our networks but one, another hot new network would rise up and we’d all sign up for it, renewing the cycle. Just look at Twitter. Everyone is now signing up for it, and while it doesn’t have a robust profile right now, it probably will at some point.

And services like Facebook Connect offer the promise of transferring your profile information to other services, but do you think Google is going to use that? I don’t think so. Why would it? It has a competing product it’s trying to push with Google Friend Connect. And it can act as nice at it wants, say the right things in public, and add links to Facebook under your Google Profile result, but do you really think Google wants Facebook winding up as the one profile you maintain? No. And vice versa.

And so we remain at a stand still. It’s one of those situations where, while competition may not be a bad thing, it can be a frustrating thing. I wonder how long until we see Yahoo add profiles to its search results? And maybe Microsoft will further its relationship with Facebook to add limited profile information from there to its queries. It’s already a mess, and it’s going to get worse before it gets better — if it ever does.

Update: As Google’s Kevin Marks notes in the comments, Google did try to use Facebook data with Friend Connect, before it was blocked almost a year ago. Of course, Friend Connect would basically negate the need for a lot of what Facebook Connect does, so what we have here are competing platforms, and a stand-off — like I said above.

[photo: flickr/andrew mason]

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TechCrunch and Founders Fund announced the first annual TechFellow Awards last week. This is a great time to stimulate investment and recognize and encourage tech entrepreneurs –starting up is cheaper, talent is more fluid, and people are more inclined to take calculated risks. If we can find more ways to spur investment, it will be good for the entrepreneur now and good for society later.

As a serial investor, I’ve enjoyed backing some good Web 2.0 companies, and it’s helped me develop a shortlist of criteria to cut the wheat from the chaff. After five minutes of a pitch, I know if I’m not going to invest, and after 30 minutes to an hour, I generally know if I will. Many entrepreneurs are product-focused, which leads them to pitch the brilliance of the product. Others are money-minded, so they can over think the business plan. But neither of these approaches answer the first few questions I want to know as an investor:

1. How will you reach a massive audience?

In real estate the wisdom says “location, location, location.” In consumer Internet, think “distribution, distribution, distribution.” Thousands of products launch every month on hundreds of thousands of new Web pages. How does a company rise above the noise to attract massive discovery and adoption? YouTube did it through existing channels like MySpace, which already reached millions. Yelp had strong SEO, which found them a mass audience searching for restaurants and nightlife. Facebook’s University-centric approach landed them 80% adoption across a campus within 60 days of launch. Every Net entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to one million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users.

2. What is your unique value proposition?

The Internet space is crowded. A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user. Many entrepreneurs create incremental improvements on existing products. This can be big – Google revolutionized search when AOL and Yahoo! were presumed to have it locked up – but more often, the pitch sounds like, “It’s a dating site, but for senior citizens…” I want to see innovation that is categorically distinct from existing propositions. Digg lets users decide which headlines are newsworthy. Last.fm tracks music listening with an iTunes plugin and buffer great music discovery. Flickr enables users to share and tag photos in new ways.

3. Will your business be capital efficient?

This may be the most important of the three. Even if you have a mass audience and unique value prop, a business fails without cash flow. An initial round of financing is important, but how reliable is later financing? Will investors see the right elements in the next stage? Your product must scale intelligently – this is why I like software. A well-coded site can adapt to mass demand without its capital expenditures scaling out of control. A product like TypePad can grow to 10 million users without half the growing pains of a service like WebVan, the Web 1.0 startup that attempted to deliver groceries to users’ doorsteps. Try reaching Facebook scale with a service like that.

With these three elements in place – mass audience, unique value, stable funding – a startup has time to discover where it can make money. Few business plans ever pan out like their owners intend. PayPal started as a plan to beam payments between Palm Pilots. Google raised funds with a vision to capitalize on enterprise search and ended up in advertising. The formula is to build an audience with a great product – then secure enough funding to figure out how to make it pay.

Since I’m focused on building LinkedIn, I’m not currently investing in new projects, but I firmly believe now is the time to take smart risks as entrepreneurs and investors. I hope these criteria help startups make better pitches as they fundraise, and maybe even encourage others to take the plunge. Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential, and if these criteria help a few more companies find capital, it’s a win for everyone.

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I got an e-mail from LinkedIn just now letting me know that this feature is now finally being added, “in response to overwhelming demand from group managers” (no kidding) and that group managers can now blast out e-mails with announcements and create a discussion topic that members can comment on automatically in the process. As a privacy measure, LinkedIn is removing the ability to download or view member e-mail addresses.

Furthermore, as announced in the e-mail and on the corporate blog, group owners and managers can now create a custom news stream they consider relevant for the group by enabling support for importing custom RSS and Atom feeds. As an aside, check out which blog they’re featuring in the screenshot!

Last but not least, Group managers now have control over whether to enable the jobs discussion capabilities within their group or not, a feature that allows members to discuss job opportunities without cluttering the main conversation. This is of course a big part of what makes LinkedIn so popular, especially in this economic climate.

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uTest, a startup that allows companies to outsource their QA testing to ‘the cloud’ has just concluded its latest quarterly bug battle, during which it put some of the world’s largest social networks to the test. Hundreds of participants (many of which have been involved in product testing for over a year) did their best to uncover flaws across Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, with $3,000 up for grabs for the testers who identified the most crucial bugs.

Below are the final results for the number of bugs found. It’s worth noting that this data is prone to bias and may well overstate the number of ’showstopping bugs’ (testers probably had a strong incentive to rate their bugs as ’showstopper’ so as to have a better chance at the prize). But it also meshes fairly well with anecdotal experience.

• Facebook: 416 uTesters found 243 bugs (.58 bugs/tester), including 14.40% that were deemed
  showstoppers by the tester
• LinkedIn: 399 uTesters found 250 bugs (.63 bugs/tester), including 9.78% that were deemed
  showstoppers by the tester.
• MySpace: 304 uTesters found 225 bugs (.74 bugs/tester), including 10.80% that were deemed
  showstoppers by the tester

Aside from logging each bug that they found, testers were also asked to rate each social network in a handful of categories and to detail some of the most apparent issues. Overall, the contest deemed Facebook to have the most complete feature set, but the social network was criticized for not having a high enough default security level (the options to keep things private are there, but are not always set by default).

LinkedIn took the title of “Best in Overall Quality”, but testers had issues syncing data with Outlook, which they considered “problematic for the ’professional social network’”

MySpace didn’t take the top prize in any of the bug testing categories, but was considered to have “a loyal following”, as it drew consistently high marks from a subset of users. Common complaints included “Overlapping images, backgrounds, titles, etc.” and slow page load times.

Testers’ choice for best overall quality: 
1.  LinkedIn (45%) 
2.  Facebook (37%)   
3.  MySpace (17%) 
 
Testers’ choice for best usability:  
1.  Facebook (39%) 
2.  LinkedIn (38%) 
3.  MySpace (17%) 
 
Testers’ choice for best feature set: 
1.  Facebook (46%) 
2.  LinkedIn (36%) 
3.  MySpace (18%)

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Angel and VC funding platform Angelsoft has launched an investor filtering tool, allowing entrepreneurs the ability to access detailed profiles on over 1,000 venture capital firms and angel investment groups in the U.S. Angelsoft allows startups to “push” their business ideas to over 400 angel investment groups and 15,949 investors across the world. The site formerly focused on connecting entrepreneurs to angel and early-stage investors only, but recently changed its model to include VC firms.

Angelsoft calls it an investor search engine, but it lacks a search box (a big flaw). Instead, entrepreneurs use Kayak-like filters to adjust their sorting results by how much an investment firm usually invests, what terms they typically offer, as well as by company-based criteria such as industry, location and stage. VC and angel firm profiles include a snapshot of the fund, industry expertise, prior investments, executive profiles and links to the LinkedIn profiles of investors. For the 450 investment groups that use Angelsoft’s VC and Angel dealflow management tools, the search engine results provide even more data, including a firm’s average response time to entrepreneurs applying for funding, number of applications a firm receives each month and additional past funding history.

The new investor sorting tool gives startups the power to vet and gain insight into potential investment firms and then choose to apply for funding from the firm which best fits their needs. It is certainly an interesting way to add more transparency into the funding world. Angelsoft was launched in 2004 by David S. Rose, Chairman of the New York Angels, and Ryan Janssen. The company’s platform is currently used by 450 angel groups and VCs (that use the platform for deal workflow), with 2,500 startup applications coming in a month. In December, the number of startup applications per month increased to just over 3,000, perhaps a sign that the economy is taking its toll on the ability of startups to get funding through more traditional means. According to Angelsoft, 2.6 percent of the applicants ultimately get funded, which seems relatively small, but that number has increased since December. As more traffic is driven to the site, the number of completed deals could rise.

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