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Today LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Classmates, a way to tap into the power of alumni networks without calling your school's alumni office. This new tool gives you access to what your fellow alums are doing in their post-school lives, highlighting what they've accomplished since graduating, an opportunity to reconnect with alums in your field and a way to find alums who are interested in helping you.

If you are trying to keep track of your competitors, you have a variety of tools that can make your search for business news easier. At the low end (meaning free) is Google Alerts and Google News, and you can build your own RSS feed collection and examine what comes through that pipeline. There are also paid gathering tools from Hoovers, Lexus and InsideView.com, just to name a couple of examples. GageIn is trying to enter this market with the release of its Content Platform and the integration with Salesforce and LinkedIn data repositories.

LinkedIn has launched status updates from companies. Administrators of company pages can post short updates just like individual users can. This provides companies with a way to engage followers and start conversations from within the public LinkedIn stream.

Users of LinkedIn could follow company profiles since 2010. Previously, users following a company would see personnel changes, new job openings and company profile updates. Now companies can also share 500-character messages, links and media with followers as well.

In a study of 300 hiring managers and recruiters, Palo Alto-based social networking monitoring service Reppler reports that 76% of hiring managers look at applicants' Facebook profiles. An additional 56% are looking at Twitter, and 48% check out LinkedIn - which seems ironic, considering that LinkedIn is where you're supposed to present your professional self.

In advance of its live event with President Obama today (starting now! 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific), LinkedIn has produced this infographic about the swath of the U.S. economy represented by its members. Since 2009, over 7.4 million job changes have been reported on LinkedIn.

The top industries on LinkedIn are higher education, marketing and advertising, information technology and health care. Of its 115 million members, almost 5 million are employed by small businesses. The biggest growth industries are renewables and environment, and oil and energy. The infographic also focuses on LinkedIn's use by veterans, as well as the number of users who have attended community college.

September is back to school time, and also a good time to update your online resume and credentials. While a new Facebook app from Brazen Careerist is more about the eye candy than anything, there are a few nuggets of utility that are worth reviewing as you attempt to better market yourself and re-invigorate your job search.

One of LinkedIn's greatest advantages is that it has a wealth of data on the workforce. It can take that data and analyze market segments to find trends of who works in a specific industry, what kind of education they have, what their background is, who they know, where they are from and so on. This morning LinkedIn released an infographic studying entrepreneurs and how they came to their position if life.

LinkedIn says it is "Sequencing the Startup DNA." Unsurprisingly, the top three schools that startup founders come from are Stanford, Harvard and MIT Sloan. Yet, LinkedIn goes on to dispel a myth of startup founders that concoct their ideas to change the world from their dorm rooms.

LinkedIn has launched a major overhaul of its mobile apps for iPhone and Android, as well as a brand new HTML5 mobile Web app. It's a complete redesign, forgoing the larger grid of menu options in favor of four key sections: Updates, You, Inbox, and Your Network. The previous menu had too many choices, and some of the titles weren't intuitive. What's the difference between "News" and "Buzz?" Why are "Connections," "Reconnect" and "Invitations" all separate buttons? The new screen simplifies the navigation options.

The update also adds new features. This release addresses what LinkedIn reports is "the #1 most requested feature" from its members, allowing users to access LinkedIn Groups from the native apps (though not from the Web app). The app has also been rearranged to open by displaying the Updates stream, which LinkedIn says is "one of the most frequently used areas of the current mobile app."

It's a little bit amazing that any social networking site could pull what many posts are calling "a Facebook" at this point in history. Nevertheless, LinkedIn has made news by creating an opt-out account setting to use member names, photos, and information in "social advertising" on the site. Facebook made this strategy infamous, although there's no way to opt out of many of Facebook's social ads.

Still, no one likes surprise opt-out uses of personal data. Complaints about this perceived breach of privacy have made the rounds over the last day or so. LinkedIn has just posted a response to the backlash offering some clarifications.

The acronym "YASNS" is well-known in Web geek circles. It stands for Yet Another Social Networking Service. In 2011, perhaps the acronym should be "YAUSNS": Yet Another Useless Social Networking Service. Even large, otherwise successful tech companies aren't immune to YAUSNS. In September last year, Apple launched a music social network called Ping. It's basically 'Twitter for music,' however it's been a fizzer - despite being embedded right into iTunes. Another company at risk of what I'll now call The Ping Effect is Amazon, which released Kindle Profiles in March of this year. It's a social network for reading, but so far it hasn't set the world on fire. A commenter on my Google Plus profile called it "The Ping of Books."

Also in March, business social network LinkedIn launched a social news service called LinkedIn Today. Is this service needed, or is it simply duplicating Techmeme, Google News and similar social news sites? Let's find out...