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.

LinkedIn Today is an industry newspaper, of sorts, available online and via LinkedIn's iPhone app. It offers headlines and links to the popular stories within certain industries and within your LinkedIn network. You'll be able to see what others in your profession are reading, as well as "save" articles to read later.

LinkedIn Today will also let you follow particular industries and will deliver the popular stories that are being shared from that sector. You'll be able to see who is sharing information along with any comments they might have included when posting. "Only LinkedIn gives you this layer of professional identity and search capability on who's sharing or tweeting an article," the company says.

It's hard to see how the curation that will happen on LinkedIn will be different from what happens on other social network sites, as many people simply duplicate their shares from Twitter, blogs, or feeds to their LinkedIn profiles. Even more, arguably, don't share at all to LinkedIn, something that will need to happen more if, indeed, this is effort is to become a useful place for people to turn to for their daily industry news.

According to the company's blog, these words and phrases are culled from more than 85 million profiles and consist of gems like "motivated", "dynamic" and "fast-paced".

LinkedIn took the data one step further and examined how these terms were clustered according to region. It seems that there are an awful lot of "innovative" folks in Europe, while those with "extensive experience" are in North America.

It may be December and therefore time for everyone (us included) to release their big "Top 10" lists of the year, but analysis of aggregate data is always a favorite. It used to be, you might need to interview a smattering of headhunters, managers and other decision-makers to determine this sort of data. Now, we have LinkedIn and its list of 85 million "resumés" to let us know what words not to use when describing ourselves to prospective employers.

LinkedIn, that online, socially-networked version of your responsible, professional self has listened to its users and begun offering additional profile sections to list publications, languages, skills, certifications and patents. You heard right - patents.

Each section is pretty self explanatory, allowing users to list their accomplishments and skill-sets. Our favorite sections, however, might be the Patents and Publications sections. In the Patents field, users can list applied-for and received patents, while the Publications section allows users to list academic journals, books, magazines, or whatever else that they've been published in. In each, they can even list other authors or inventors they worked with in these endeavors.

We spoke briefly with Mario Sundar, a social media manager with LinkedIn, who told us that this was just the first step and that more would be coming soon. We're certainly looking forward to seeing how profiles can become more intricately connected and what this new layer will offer in terms of getting a quick background on individuals through their LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn already offered a quick way to get background information on people you're interested in and that background just got a little bit deeper and more layered.

Unfortunately, the implementation is a big disappointment. The condescending, pageview hungry attitude that colors so much of what LinkedIn does is all over this new feature as well. I've recorded a short screencast tour of the feature below. Let me know if this drives you as nuts as it does me.

To be fair, the company says this is only the beginning and that there is more development of this feature on the way. It's hard not to be cynical about it though, as LinkedIn does things just like this all the time. There is also the ability to customize which kinds of company updates get delivered in your LinkedIn email newsletter, and maybe that will work out great for the stuffed-shirt-Blackberry wielding crowd, but the social media users the company seeks to connect with need more and better ways to consume this information!

There is a feed of your network updates you can subscribe to, but it's filled to the brim with imported tweets and the most low-value LinkedIn updates like new friend connections. Please oh please, LinkedIn, why can't you just make it easy for your users to get clear notifications of when people and companies make job changes and hires, in an interface of our choosing, so that we can come back to LinkedIn if we want to read more? It's maddening.

We've been complaining about this for years and the company keeps coming to us saying "you're going to love what we've got to show you next!" But new developments continue to have the same limitations. It's a heartbreaking loss of opportunity for all parties involved.

LinkedIn showed off a new addition to its Lab site today called the LinkedIn Connection Timeline. It's a very fun way to remember people you used to work with throughout the years - and see where they are now. Built internally by LinkedIn's Gordon Koo, the visualization does a good job illustrating the tip of the iceberg of what structured, social data can provide when accessed programmatically.

And it's fun. It brings to mind the app Memolane and makes me wish someone would build something like this for Twitter or Facebook. Take the list of people I'm connected to there and show me when on a timeline I connected with the ones I have interacted with the most. Play me a song that my Last.fm profile says I used to listen to a lot, don't listen to anymore and that has a high-emotion rhythm to it and you've got a mashup that could bring lots of people near tears. (You just know that Facebook will offer something like this someday.) Always more emotionally reserved, LinkedIn at least offers a fun retrospective of past co-workers.

Career-minded social network LinkedIn has finally released version 1.0 of its Android app, bringing the site's functionality onto the number one smartphone OS in the U.S.. While LinkedIn has had an iPhone app since 2008, it only just recently began testing an app for Android.

The app has been in beta testing but today becomes available to all in the Android Market, giving LinkedIn users the ability to view updates, search, message and more.

The company explains LinkedIn for Android as "a continuation of our efforts to help you leverage the power of your professional network anywhere, anytime."

The app has six distinct functions or "modules" - updates, search, connections, invitations, messages and "reconnect". With these, users can view timeline updates, search for users from within connections and the entire LinkedIn user base, respond to invitations, and send and receive InMail messages. The "connections" module acts as your LinkedIn "address book in the cloud" and "reconnect" provides connection suggestions.

While I don't imagine I will be looking for connection suggestions on my phone, the ability to quickly look up user profiles before a meeting sounds like a great feature. Have a meeting and don't know much about the person you're meeting with? Check out LinkedIn and you can get a full background.

We'd love to see this integrated with recent LinkedIn acquisition CardMunch and even a business card alternative service like Hashable or CardCloud.

One of the bigger misconceptions in the comments was that LinkedIn is primarily a job-hunting site. But there are reasons to use LinkedIn even if you have a job you love, aside from the obvious benefits of keeping up on your industry and making connections with potential business partners.

• LinkedIn is a great contact manager. Not all of your contacts will have their phone numbers in their LinkedIn profile (and if you don't, you should add it, according to networking experts), but almost all of them have a Web site and primary email address that you can access. LinkedIn also lets you add notes for each contact, much like a regular address book, so you can keep track of interaction with a contact and add information like best contact phone numbers, birthdays and other information you want to remember.
• LinkedIn Today curates news you care about. Every time I log into LinkedIn I'm presented with three news stories that the site thinks will be of interest to me, based on my industry (tech journalism and higher education). I can click through to LinkedIn today and get more stories, as well as recommendations for additional industries I may be interested in. The stories, in my experience, tend to be more enterprising and more focused on trends than the breaking news that fills my RSS, Twitter and Facebook feeds.
• LinkedIn Groups increase the number of people in my business network. Almost every employment and social media expert I spoke with in compiling last week's post stressed the importance of finding, joining and participating in LinkedIn groups related to your industry. "Join alumni groups, industry groups and professional interest-based groups," said Kelly A. Lux, a social media strategist at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies. "Post links of interest to the group, ask and answer questions and search the group members for new connections."

Not a lot yet, it turns out. We've gathered some of the most interesting reactions so far below.

What do you think of those opinions? I think they paint a good picture of the breadth of reactions and they all seem fair to me.

LinkedIn says it will be using the money raised for general operating, marketing and acquisitions of other companies. That sounds interesting.

Once bidding begins on the stocks issued, the value of the stocks already held by investors and execs will be determined. Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider did some math today and came up with an estimate:

That would mean LinkedIn [founder] Reid Hoffman's 21.4% stake is worth $430 million. CEO Jeff Weiner's is worth $80 million. [VCs:] Sequoia's stake - bought for $4.7 million - is worth $380 million, Greylock's $320 million, Bessemer's, $100 million.

For more business details, see AllThingsD.

Not bad. Hopefully the service will grow more useful. It's certainly just begun to tap into what it could do.

"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.

CardMunch, the iPhone app that helps import business cards into a digital format, has announced that it has been bought by LinkedIn.

While that's good news for CardMunch, its even better news for you, its potential users. "Starting today," writes the company, "the current version of the CardMunch app will be completely free!"

According to the announcement, the service is now entirely free, allowing you to add as many cards as you like, free of charge. If you don't see this in your app, you can update it to reflect the change.

CardMunch is interesting in how it works - it isn't a digital recognition program. Instead, each card is "transcribed, edited and reviewed by multiple workers to guarantee accuracy." Already, the service had a "1-tap LinkedIn Invite" to help you connect with people on LinkedIn, but we're hoping this acquisition will offer an even tighter integration with the social network for professionals.

Will it continue to operate the same way? There's no mention of changing in the announcement, but we've reached out to LinkedIn to find out. However it works, it could be a great addition for LinkedIn. I know I, for one, will be more likely to follow up with my connections using LinkedIn if I can import all those business cards into my mobile contacts for free.

Apply with LinkedIn allows applicants to adjust their LinkedIn profile information to suit the position before they apply. After they submit, the confirmation screen displays people in the applicant's LinkedIn network who work at the company, allowing them to connect or ask for a referral.

But this is also a win for job applicants. Using LinkedIn as the primary point of contact in a job application, rather than a secondary Web presence that doesn't replace the good old-fashioned résumé, makes maintaining one's profile a much better use of time. The customization options in the Apply with LinkedIn plug-in solve the problem of maintaining multiple résumés. Best of all, this can solve the unending mysteries of email attachments and file formats in job applications.

Email-based job applications follow a basic pattern, imitating the way things used to work on paper, but the lack of standards makes for a bewildering experience that changes from one application to the next. Some employers require files in DOC format, others allow PDF; some want cover letters in the email, others want them as attachments. This is no more fun for the employer than it is for the applicant.

LinkedIn could solve those problems if it can drive widespread adoption of Apply with LinkedIn, and it's in a strong position to do so. While other social networks are elbowing their way into the jobs space, LinkedIn, as the dominant dedicated professional networking site, has a clear head start. The company went public this year, and the site crossed 100 million members in March.

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.