LinkedIn Events offers not just event search, but recommendations based on the contents of your profile, sophisticated information about attendees and updates about the events in your LinkedIn update feed. Eight thousand events are already listed and event organizers can ad more.

The recommendations are key here. Recommendation is like the search you didn't even know you wanted to do - it's a great way to surface value from noise.

Unfortunately the events page is down at press time, but we look forward to its return.

We like LinkedIn alot here at ReadWriteWeb (it's one of the primary news sources for our new site about hiring activity) and we think Events is a great addition to the service. The events feature appears to be built on the OpenSocial platform, so there's a good chance that these features will be available in other settings beyond LinkedIn in the future.

It won't be a very warm welcome compared to the Facebook lovefest. Though this should be unsurprising, LinkedIn's platform will require permission from the company before developers can get in on the action. Though Facebook apps do need to be added by Facebook to the app directory, a quick look through there shows that the bar is low enough that it may as well be open to all.

LinkedIn will focus its platform on letting developers tie LinkedIn functionality to outside services (Salesforce is the example given, surprise surprise) and to adding buttoned-up business functionality to LinkedIn itself.

It's Not a Social Network!

Nye also told the Times that LinkedIn doesn't consider itself a social network, either. That's funny, that's what Facebook loudly insisted on to its developers pre-platform launch, too. They weren't allowed to mention MySpace or the phrase social networking in their PR. Facebook is a social utility - they insisted. That was an eye-roller at the time and sounds even sillier now.

We'll see what the LinkedIn platform looks like when the rubber finally hits the road, but when it happens - don't quit your day job to be a LinkedIn app developer.

"What do you do for a living" is one of the most potent questions a person can be asked and online that means LinkedIn. Unfortunately, in this era of data portability and connected social networks, LinkedIn isn't playing very nicely.

Programmatic access to LinkedIn data is reserved for a very select few high-profile API partners. The company appears to operate under the assumption that only heavyweight partners could move the needle for its bottom line, not a thriving ecosystem of independent innovators. Hardly surprising for a company that spends so much of its time in public talking about how wealthy its users are.

FriendFeed used to include updates to your LinkedIn profile in the activity streams it displayed. That was great, but there was nothing official going on - FriendFeed was scraping LinkedIn. When LinkedIn added a layer of obfuscation over its HTML, FriendFeed took the hint and stopped, the now Facebook-owned company says.

Why not make LinkedIn all the more valuable by making it the currency that social sites all around the web make us of? Would that not drive all the more people to LinkedIn itself, to fill out their profiles there? It's possible that LinkedIn has done a serious analysis of the benefits of a developer ecosystem vs. very limited partnerships and come to the conclusion that it has - but it still seems like a real shame.

Imagine the innovation that could be made possible by developer access to LinkedIn!

Congratulations to LinkedIn for hitting 50 million users. Now please open up the data! Otherwise we'll have to cheer for a more open competitor to challenge your dominance in this market.

Update: Adam Nash, Vice President, Search & Platform Products at LinkedIn, says things are set to improve in the future. Below in comments he writes: "Marshall, I think you'll be quite happy with our plans for improvements to our APIs. Stay tuned." Fantastic! Let's see what you've got, Adam.

For example Stowe Boyd, a man who knows a thing or two about social media, had this to say:

“Bernard Lunn thinks LinkedIn is in a great spot because 80% of his contacts are there, and Facebook isn’t real for business yet. Wait six months, Bernard.”

I am not sure what Stowe is predicting in six months. However I am interested in prediction markets, so how about we define a specific prediction and then revisit it in six months? If Facebook and/or LinkedIn were public companies, we could test our predictive powers in the stock market with real money. However because they are private companies (for now), we can just do this for fun and bragging rights. Anyway public companies are now all boring, predictable enterprises; we have to recreate the fun in the private markets.

So the prediction, we think, from Stowe is this:

“In 6 months Facebook will have more of your business contacts than LinkedIn”.

We'll check back in 6 months whether that prediction comes true. But for now we'll run a poll to see whether RWW readers think LinkedIn can hold off the Facebook challenge in business networking. Please take a moment to vote in this poll:

During these uncertain times for many Web companies, the investment marks a decided vote of confidence in LinkedIn's strategy. Perhaps more importantly, the admittedly "strategic" investment hints at some potential partnerships for LinkedIn in the coming months.

LinkedIn CEO, Dan Nye, highlights:

"This funding strengthens LinkedIn further, and will help us to continue creating additional services for professionals to connect and collaborate more effectively, around the world."

What sorts of "additional services" might those be? It wasn't long ago that LinkedIn announced a content partnership with The New York Times. It doesn't take a drastic leap of faith to imagine a similar partnership with McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek.

SAP brings another potential partnership to the table. ReadWriteWeb's Bernard Lunn has hypothesized that "LinkedIn could replace Outlook and SalesForce." With SAP and its suite of business tools in the mix, that hypothesis could quickly become a reality.

But those are simply educated guesses. What's certain? LinkedIn is profitable, it has money in the bank, and it just convinced some additional heavyweights to invest in its vision. And that accomplishment - especially in light of the current financial atmosphere - is not to be taken lightly.

Some of the feedback on Bernard's post suggested that it's Facebook which will take advantage of business networking opportunities, moreso than LinkedIn. So at the beginning of this week, we ran a poll asking: In 6 months time, will you have more business contacts in Facebook than LinkedIn? The poll is still running (see bottom of this page), but the current results are in favor of LinkedIn:

Yes, Facebook will have more 27% (102 votes)
No, LinkedIn will still have more 66% (245 votes)
They will be even 6% (24 votes)

As Bernard noted in his post this week, Deconstructing the Business Social Network, to compete on its own LinkedIn probably needs to move away from being a destination site and open up its data via API. There is just too much competition out there from start pages, email services and social networks.

However if they did get acquired by News Corp, that would give LinkedIn a foundation to hold onto its goal of being the destination site of choice for business networking. It's hard to see MySpace being leveraged by LinkedIn, as their audiences are so different. But as Techcrunch UK pointed out, News Corp has a number of newspapers that professionals read - including The Wall Street Journal and (in the UK) The Times and The Sunday Times - so LinkedIn could definitely leverage those.

An acquisition of LinkedIn by News Corp would make sense for both parties. And as LinkedIn is a part of OpenSocial (as is MySpace), that would put even more pressure on Facebook to join OpenSocial. So it'd be a win for Google too, if Rupert buys LinkedIn. What do you think? And if you haven't already, please take part in our poll below:

We want to spend as little time as possible so that we can get the job done, get off our computers, and have a life. LinkedIn is the most efficient place to hunt for customers and employees. It is the first real change in productivity for those who work on the front lines of business. We have written about how useful it is here and here, and we included LinkedIn in our Top 10 Enterprise Products for 2008.

So, repeat after me: LinkedIn is not a destination site. We thought the Valley intelligentsia long ago proclaimed the end of destination sites. The desire to "get people to spend more time on LinkedIn" is linked to a failed business model around advertising.

LinkedIn should be a "contact graph," accessible via the API tools that you need to get the job done.

Why Emulate Facebook?

When Facebook was nominally valued at $15 billion, envy was understandable. Now, word is that Facebook is worth more like $1 billion. And to prove I am not a recent jumper on the Facebook downward-rolling bandwagon, here is my bear case on Facebook from July 2007.

LinkedIn won't ever beat Facebook on page views. So why try? Beat it by being more useful. And then business people will pay.

SaaS businesses have been the quiet success story of 2008 and will romp home to glory in 2009. It is the perfect disruptive model for a downturn.

LinkedIn could be a great SaaS success story by mixing and integrating the right features to become the place where business people live and pay for services.

Contact Networking

Add a touch of integration with email, a pinch of basic CRM capabilities. Roll it all up into the biggest business contact graph on the planet. Ask $5 of each user per month, the "Google price." Juice up the returns with some transactional services, making money by connecting people.

If there is one company in the tech space I would own shares in if I could, it would be LinkedIn. As long as it stops trying to appeal to college kids.

Of course I agree that opening its platform to developers is the best (the only?) way for LinkedIn to take its service to the next level. Interestingly Alex Iskold wrote about this back in January, and his post then is well worth re-visiting now.

Notably absent are features that let the users feel the network. For example, it would be great to see a visualization of all of my connections as a network; and on a map. It would be also great to be able to explore my network, using a visualization technique like Thinkmap. Another more subtle thing that is missing from LinkedIn is the strength of the relationship. Not all of my connections are equal, some are much stronger than others. This is a very valuable piece of information that can help a lot with things like lead generation. It is not easy to capture the strength of the relationship, but even a trivial heuristic like 'number of times I've clicked on someone's profile' would be a good start.

Alex concluded (and remember this was mid-January, before Facebook announced its open platform in May):

Today Facebook is much more about interactions and staying in touch - on a practical basis - daily. LinkedIn is about staying connected over longer periods of time and leveraging business connections for business purposes. It seems to us that LinkedIn needs to evolve more towards the Facebook model, where people can interact more on the site via profiles. Unlike Facebook, the interactions between individuals on LinkedIn cannot be open to all - but the idea that people interact on the site is important, because this is what keeps them coming back.

What do you think about LinkedIn and how it can compete with the increasingly powerful Facebook?

2. The best businesses IPO when markets are down. It shows strength. Who cares if it takes 12 months for markets to pickup? Insiders will be locked-in for a while anyway.

3. Facebook cannot IPO. Their $15bn valuation won’t wash with public investors and they can hardly do a down round. So LinkedIn gets the mindshare and public currency to win the next round.

5. LinkedIn keeps innovating, such as their recent move into expert networks to compete with Gerson Lehman Group. This move is an obvious revenue earner.

6. LinkedIn’s revenue model is not tied to advertising and is therefore more recession proof.

7. The bloom is off the Facebook rose, so strike while the iron is hot (sorry about mixed metaphors Ed)

8. We all need some cheery news amidst all this recession talk.

9. Somebody needs to show that public markets are suitable for high growth, high tech businesses and not just dividend-spouting oil companies.

10. Because I forecast that they would and I would love to be proved right.

Finally, why do we always need 10 items on these lists?

With Profile Organizer, bookmarking is simple. Users save contacts with one click and are given the option to create category files for their contacts. If you want to separate the product managers from the designers or the engineers from the HR staff, you can. Users are given the chance to name their contact folders by occupation, location or other relevant labels. From here you can also choose to add contact information and notes. The information is only visible to you so you can be as descriptive as you like. If you don't already have a tool like Salesforce, the notes section is a great place to jot down a contact's interests and hobbies. If you're the type of person who needs more to jog your memory, it's also a great place to record the details of your last conversation.

The Profile Organizer is available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30-day trial. Business members can access the service but are given a limit of 5 contact folders. Meanwhile, Business Pro and Pro members can create as many as 25 contact folders. To test the new product visit Linkedin.com/organizer.

LinkedIn users are now being shown personalized news targeting their industry verticals on the Business and Technology sections of NYTimes.com and will then be prompted to share those stories will professional associates.

A number of other social networks and bookmarking services have "share this story" links on NYT stories, but it's unclear how much traction those links alone are getting. Last month we wrote about one of those services, social news site Mixx, that's still seeing fewer than 1 million unique visitors per month despite "share this on Mixx" buttons on a long list of the biggest news sites in the world, including NYTimes.com.

How much more compelling is this partnership? We think it's a lot more compelling; check out the screenshots below and imagine the feedback loop this could create between the NYT and LinkedIn. LinkedIn has 25 million registered users and the NYT sees 17 million + unique visitors per month, but the partnership will need none the less to introduce more people to LinkedIn in order to really be a home run. See this NYT page for an "introduction to LinkedIn." That's pretty classy, though it's unclear yet when that link will be displayed and when it won't.

We'll see how the recommendation process works; we hope it doesn't rely exclusively only on explicitly shared links, but we'll see. This certainly gets the mental juices flowing about any number of other integration and recommendation possibilities.

One question we have is about money changing hands. There has been extensive discussion around the web of late about LinkedIn using partnerships as a revenue source and it wouldn't surprise us if the NYT is paying for this integration. LinkedIn may not be a huge social network, but its user demographics are some of the most financially desirable in the world.

We expect to see more partnerships like this emerge, perhaps from a chastised Facebook attempting to relaunch its Beacon program in a more acceptable fashion.

• The greatest overlap between OpenSocial container sites exists between Myspace and Hi5, in which 43% of Hi5 users also use Myspace.
• Facebook users are 63% female and 36% male whereas the sites integrated with the OpenSocial platform are 61% female and 38% male.
• 52% of Facebook users are 18-25, whereas 40% of the users are 18-25 for the five container sites on the OpenSocial platform.
• Facebook users tend to use 2.9 major social networking sites on average whereas users of OpenSocial container sites tend to use 2.7 major social networking sites.

Myspace Users
- 11.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 63% female, 36% male
- 20% <18 yrs, 40% 18-25 yrs, 27% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.4 major social networking sites used on average
- 15% are on Facebook, 2% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 6% are on Plaxo, 17% are on Hi5

LinkedIn Users
- 0.8 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 38% female, 61% male
- 2% <18 yrs, 9% 18-25 yrs, 49% 26-35 yrs, 24% 36-45 yrs, 16% >45 yrs
- 3.2 major social networking sites used on average
- 16% are on Facebook, 25% are on Myspace, 12% are on Friendster, 16% are on Plaxo, 8% are on Hi5

Friendster Users
- 2.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 58% female, 41% male
- 12% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 36% 26-35 yrs, 7% 36-45 yrs, 5% >45 yrs
- 3.0 major social networking sites used on average
- 10% are on Facebook, 44% are on Myspace, 5% are on LinkedIn, 5% are on Plaxo, 26% are on Hi5

Plaxo Users
- 1.3 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 62% female, 37% male
- 16% <18 yrs, 39% 18-25 yrs, 24% 26-35 yrs, 10% 36-45 yrs, 11% >45 yrs
- 3.6 major social networking sites used on average
- 20% are on Facebook, 53% are on Myspace, 11% are on LinkedIn, 9% are on Friendster, 15% are on Hi5

Hi5 Users
- 4.5 million users identifed in Rapleaf
- 60% female, 39% male
- 21% <18 yrs, 44% 18-25 yrs, 23% 26-35 yrs, 6% 36-45 yrs, 6% >45 yrs
- 2.8 major social networking sites used on average
- 13% are on Facebook, 43% are on Myspace, 2% are on LinkedIn, 13% are on Friendster, 2% are on Plaxo

Recently I have been using it for headhunting. From talking to both Xing and LinkedIn management, I understand that headhunting is the primary use case - at least as a revenue driver for them.

Which is why good headhunters will always be in business. Even if LinkedIn changes the game for them.

Which it does. But it really changes the game in a not very nice way for Monster and Dice.

This became clear when I spoke to the first headhunter. He is very good at his niche, I have used him with success before. So I was shocked to find he did not know about LinkedIn. I clued him in. He owes me a discount on my next search.

I asked the next headhunter and his response was “it’s awesome, totally changes the game”.

He is right. The reason is that LinkedIn connects me to people who are not looking, but who might be with the right proposition. So I can target not only companies where people may have the right experience but companies where the employees might also be feeling nervous about the future.

That saves me the Monster and Dice fees. Which would only get me the active job seekers.

My proposition to the headhunter who was not using LinkedIn was that he should put his whole proprietary database up on LinkedIn. This was his pride and joy, the accumulated asset from decades in the game. So the idea gave him some agita. But I also said that he could connect to me and I was happy to give him an exclusive on this search. I was not willing to pay the 33% headhunting fee, more like half that (more a “recruiter” than an “executive search” fee). But that would be worth it to me as I would get his contacts as well as his time and experience filtering and closing the right candidate.

This works because the headhunter can set the Connections tab as private. That prevents a client or competitor browsing through his database. They can see his Connections via Search. But transparency is one price to pay. In the end it is only names on LinkedIn, what matters is the quality of the relationship.

I don’t know how headhunters will adapt to LinkedIn. I am not sure if it is wise for them to load in their contacts. I know that would work for me as a client, but our interests are not totally aligned. I do know that they will have to adapt.

I am sure that Monster, Dice and their equivalent will have to work a lot harder to prove their value.

I also know that many companies would love to ban their employees from being on LinkedIn, to avoid them being poached. However I suspect that effort will fail.

In all my use of LinkedIn, I have still not paid them a dime. Which makes me a total cheapskate and ingrate. But I don’t need to pay them to get the value, which is tremendous. So I am still not totally sold on LinkedIn as a business. But that does not matter as I cannot buy their shares. I am totally sold on their value as a service.

LinkedIn recently gave me an RSS feed of events in my network that feeds up to my start-page. So I can read the latest tech news and see who my contacts have been meeting. The latter, being personal to my little corner of the world, is far more interesting. I know you can get that kind of thing with Facebook and FriendFeed (neither of which is for a “suit” like me). But in the business world, this is quite exciting.

Image credit: cosmonautirussi

In that context LinkedIn's InMail just seemed like an irritation. However, I am now re-evaluating that. Partly because I am thinking that I may need something like SalesForce, just a basic contact manager. There are many good SalesForce alternatives; we are totally spoiled for choice in that area. But that seems like one more thing to manage/learn and possibly pay for (or use a free service that may not survive).

So, LinkedIn doing both starts to make sense. With a few provisos. The first is a pricing scheme I can agree to. That does not include Free, I don't trust Free in this context, because it too often means, "lock you in and then charge you too much later." Nor will I pay $20 or $50 per month for something that limits how many mails I can send.

Their $60 per year plan sounds good. That's $5 per month. But I would want unlimited mails for my own contacts whether they are in LinkedIn or not. They can still charge me for the right to send mails to people in LinkedIn who I don't know, which sounds like wonderful spam control. So for $60 I get Gmail like functionality. OK, InMail is a long way from Gmail, but all that is is some email software, and I am sure LinkedIn can license, buy or build some good webmail software, ideally with offline sync capability from day one.

Not only would this give them a really solid subscription revenue base, but every email would be viral marketing for LinkedIn.

Why would I use this rather than Gmail? Four reasons:

1. Automatic contact management, particularly the self-updating nature (i.e., a contact changes jobs and I can see that and their contact details are always up to date).
2. One less system to use, as LinkedIn is becoming enough of a habit that it now takes time each day.
3. Built-in spam filter based on white-list. Yes, Gmail has great spam control, but it is still a total pain in Outlook.
4. LinkedIn actually helps me sell/recruit/buy through networking. That is a totally different level of value proposition from just helping me to send emails or manage contacts.

Could InMail send/receive mail outside LinkedIn? Of course it could. Email standards are open.

I can envision all kinds of cool CRM 2.0 type features based on the social graph.

Of course, all this is possible because Microsoft has been asleep at the switch. It has been apparent for many years, to many people that the real social graph is in the email system and Microsoft Outlook/Exchange is where biz people keep their emails. Microsoft could have done this already, easily. Possibly they still could, but they are leaving it a bit long.

I am sure Google gets the opportunity. They have the same social graph within Gmail. I wonder what they have brewing in their labs?

Once you make the decision to break the Outlook habit as I have already done, the next step to something like InMail is not a very big one. Already my contact database in LinkedIn is more up to date and clean than my Gmail one.

Like all social networks, LinkedIn is under pressure to "open up." They may be be able to push back on that front if they create enough value so that biz people decide to live in LinkedIn as opposed to living in Outlook and SalesForce or the equivalent CRM. That would save hard $ from those services, so its a good recession play as well. LinkedIn has some weak plays for RSS aggregation, but they can easily do something better that makes LinkedIn more like a fully customizable start page.

LinkedIn could be the big IPO story that will validate this market and the one that we've been waiting for since Google went public.

Twitter and LinkedIn

Twitter saw 84% of its downtime in the first half of 2008 and suffered no major outages in the second half of the year. Even though Twitter continues its rapid growth, it has clearly managed to gets its infrastructure under control.

The reliability of LinkedIn, however, is slipping. With every new quarter, LinkedIn's downtime increased. Clearly, LinkedIn's continuous growth is responsible for some of these outages. In terms of total hours of downtime , LinkedIn's 45.8 hours were only trumped by Twitter's 84 hours, though Friendster (43.8 hours) and Reunion.com (41.9 hours) were only marginally better off in 2008.

Other Stats

According to Pingdom, Reunion.com suffered the longest continuous outage, with close to 10 hours on March 29. Facebook's longest continuous outage only lasted for less than half an hour.