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."

Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

It wasn't a big acquisition (TechCrunch was told around $15m) but it was a validation of some big ideas.

Rapportive is a simple thing, and yet it's founded on some complex and potent technology trends. Trends like: identity as platform, harvesting of social network user data and APIs for cross-site functionality. On top of profile data and email adresses, you can build awesome tools.

Rapportive is magical; it's one of the first things I show people when I am excited to show them something about the internet. Many people immediately see the value of it. When we first wrote about it here, we titled our post Stop What You Are Doing Right Now and Install This Browser Plug-in. No one objected, it was clearly awesome. (The line Stop What You Are Doing is something best reserved for when you can really back it up.)

Since that time, Rapportive has served as one of the most compelling elements in the still-unfullfilling ecosystem of CRM applications floating around the internet. None solve all your problems, most are hard to make the time to come back to. Not Rapportive, though. Not if you're a Gmail user, anyway. It delivers relationship management value in almost every email you send and recieve.

Much of that value comes from the integration of 3rd party services. There's a whole list of apps built on Rapportive. They sit in your email, look at who you're corresponding with and then let you interact with that person or their content on other social networks. Twitter and LinkedIn have been the best in my experience, but enterprise Rapportive users may have prefered other apps on the platform.

Woe, woe to LinkedIn if they screw with this. If LinkedIn is to Rapportive as Twitter has been to Tweetdeck then I am going to be one unhappy user. If LinkedIn treats Rapportive as well as it has treated CardMunch (which is a miracle app) then we're in good shape.

LinkedIn may serve up less data in Rapportive simply because this is probably the end of Rapportive's relationship with the super-controversial social data mining service Rapleaf. Update: Rapportive contacted me to say they haven't been using Rapleaf for more than a year now. Noted! Many people hate Rapleaf, but they love the Rapportive interface that serves up some of that information. Fortunately Rapportive does not surface some of the information Rapleaf makes available, like home and car ownership and family status.

Rapportive was the best example of what could be done with aggregated user data though! All too often, when you ask someone about aggregated social network user data they immediately say "I'm opposed to it!"

As a platform for the creation of products, services, new ways to relate to the people and the web arround us though - Rapportive is a beautiful example of what the future of the web could be. It's not about apps like Path sucking your phone's contact info into its servers without telling you; it's not about services like Pinterest surreptitiously changing your shared URLs to capture affiliate revenue.

No, the future of user data as a platform, in its best form, is to show you the faces of the people you're meeting by email. It's about helping you connect with them. Hey, you might say, I see you sent me an email. I haven't had a chance to reply yet, but you'll notice that I just started following you on Twitter. (A person can also guess another person's email by guessing at variations of their name @ their company domain.com.)

I sure hope Rapportive can grow and thrive in its new home. And I hope that it will inspire whole new worlds of startups building

So we aren't reporting that it has happened, but we're bracing ourselves in case it does. Since Rapportive is the most useful plug-in ever, we're concerned about something bad happening to it. But if it had to be somebody, an acquisition by LinkedIn could be a good choice.

LinkedIn already has lots of the pieces of a customer (or contact) relationship management (CRM) service like Rapportive. In January 2011, it bought Cardmunch, a mobile app that turns photos of business cards into online contact info. In October, it acquired Connected, which let users manage, tag and sort contacts across platforms, enter notes (which Rapportive does, too), and view recent communications. That's a lot of smoke around the idea that LinkedIn's building a CRM service. But again, we haven't seen any fire.

It sure would make sense, though. LinkedIn is already the go-to network for work contacts. It's the most comprehensive professional profile most people have. Plus, it's already openly making moves to be a more extensible service, bringing its human resources know-how to other sites that need it. For example, last year, it launched a plug-in that lets employers use LinkedIn for job applications on their own sites. Gmail is another obvious place to put LinkedIn information, as Rapportive has proven.

And just for fun, here's another tidbit. Rapportive is currently a browser extension that works on Gmail. If LinkedIn bought it and threw its weight behind it, imagine the enterprise power of Rapportive for Outlook.

Scuttlebutt is that #LinkedIn has acquired #Rapportive - my favorite in-Gmail SocialCRM tool. Hope they don't close it down...

— Ben Kepes (@benkepes) February 7, 2012

@eileentso Sorry, can't comment. But publishing articles on the basis of rumour and speculation is a dubious practice imho.

— Martin Kleppmann (@martinkl) February 7, 2012

Will Rapportive continue to support all the other apps on its platform if LinkedIn acquires it?Will there be Salesforce integration?

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) February 7, 2012

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock

So that has left little time to give love to my profile on LinkedIn, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest niche social network or the smallest of the big, all-encompassing social networks. Some people will tell you that sooner or later, all of our networking, social and professional, will be centrally located on Facebook. Others will insist that you need a LinkedIn profile, if only to protect the eyes of potential employers from falling on photos of you wearing an ugly shirt and a stupid grin at last year's company cookout.

I know the basics we've all heard - have a photo, make sure its a professional photo, make sure your profile is 100% complete and don't link Twitter or Facebook to automatically update your LinkedIn status. But I still wasn't seeing the results that had other people swearing by LinkedIn. I reached out to the career coaches, social media experts and hiring managers for the best strategies for making LinkedIn work.

Avoid Back-Scratch Recommendations

One of the LinkedIn features that wouldn't work on Facebook is the Recommendation, where clients, past bosses, and former and current co-workers can give you a mini-reference letter. With a few keystrokes they can give you a recommendation that is often more effective than the old photo-copied reference letters we used to keep in file drawers.

But here's the catch: potential employers can not only see who has written references for you, but can see who you have written references for. It doesn't look good to hiring managers when the only references you have are from people you have written references for. In small industries, where people may know one another, that problem can be compounded when you write a recommendation saying someone is great, when everyone in the industry knows that person is anything but.

"You want to limit how many recommendations you write," said Sree Sreenivasan, dean of student affairs and a professor at Columbia University's Journalism School and organizer of last week's Social Media Weekend in New York. "You probably don't want to write too many more than 10, depending on what industry you're in."

Connect

LinkedIn makes you go through a series of extra steps when you try to connect with someone. You have to demonstrate how you're connected, which helps cut down on potential spammers. Some career experts say this is a good thing, as, unlike Twitter, where you try to collect as many followers as possible, you should limit your connections to people you have worked with.

Sreenivasan thinks differently and said once people get through those verification hoops, he accepts their requests on his LinkedIn profile.

"If anyone in this room asks to connect on LinkedIn, I'll accept," he said to a lecture hall full of several hundred people at Social Media Weekend on Sunday. "Of course I would! You're all here, so it's like you're customers."

Use Keywords

LinkedIn has a feature still in beta that lets you search job-specific keywords (for example, writing, reporting, editing in my case). It will also show you if those keywords are being searched more or less on LinkedIn, and offer some suggestions for additional keywords to consider adding to your profile based on your search.

"Search engine marketing is very passive, but proactive participation on LinkedIn can be very helpful in this type of situation, where targeting is very important, and where displaying your expertise can be more productive in gaining qualified leads than blatant advertising," said Philippa Gamse, author of 42 Rules for a Web Presence That Wins. "Yes, it takes some focused time, but can really pay off."

On Wednesday, while killing time waiting for Facebook to announce its IPO, I added some keywords to my LinkedIn profile. Within 24 hours of adding the keywords "public speaking" to my profile, someone had emailed asking me to speak at a conference about using social media in college classrooms.

LinkedIn Is Not Your Resume

One of the biggest mistakes people make is simply cutting-and-pasting their resume into LinkedIn profile fields, according to Kristina Jaramillo, who runs the Website Get Linked In Help. It's a common mistake, which means people who do that are stuck in the crowd.

"The majority of profiles that read like resumes are not engaging and are not prospect or customer focused. Most business professionals' headlines just state their position," Jaramillo said. "Their summaries are written in third person and they do not explain how they can help and the results they achieve for clients."

Explore Apps

Kelly A Lux, a social media strategist at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, said LinkedIn's iPhone app "is one of the best mobile social app user-experiences you will find."

Lux also likes the Cardmunch app for scanning business cards and automatically connecting with people you meet in real-life networking on LinkedIn, as well as the Job Change Notifier, which will shoot you an email everytime someone you're connected to lands a new position.

But that's just the start. Lux advises people to add custom Web site apps to their LinkedIn profile, like the Amazon's Reading List app to show what they're reading and TripIt, which shows where you are traveling.

TripIt is "great if you want to meet up with connections in cities you're visiting," she said.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

The OPEN Act does have some flaws, and in some points parralells SOPA, as noted by technology and law blogger Eric Goldman. Goldman notes that, like SOPA, OPEN "assumes there is a problem with foreign rogue websites that needs to be solved...and more importantly, attacking the money supply to supposed bad actors remains too blunt an instrument."

"While OPEN can't really be fixed to resolve my two structural concerns, my hope is that the discussion about OPEN will force rightsowners to provide *credible* evidence of harms that they or consumers are suffering (no more self-serving hype, please), and that such evidence will force us to think carefully about how 'rifle shot' solutions (as opposed to shotgun solutions) can ameliorate those harms," Goldman said.

Narrowing down the ten biggest Web news stories of 2011 was no easy task. Lots of stories had a massive impact. Some of them fit into a larger, ongoing trend, while many are singular, important events. Some stories broke to extensive attention and fanfare, only to see their significance fizzle out within a few weeks. We've painstakingly whittled down ten of the biggest stories of the year and rounded them up for you here.

The biggest story in tech this year was also one of the biggest news stories around the globe, period. The death of Steve Jobs sparked a worldwide outpouring of grief not just because he was the cofounder and CEO of one of the world's most beloved and successful companies, but also because his life was cut short at a time when he was nowhere near finished making his impact.

Walter Isaacson's official biography describes a frail and dying Jobs being actively involved in the development of the iPhone 4S and talking about about his next big idea: an Apple-branded television set, something that is expected to launch sometime next year.

Here on ReadWriteWeb we looked at Jobs's legacy in a historical context, examined his impact on user experience and design and looked at his unique approach to business and why it was so effective. Our own Scott M. Fulton III turned back the clock to the early days of Apple and took a detailed look at what Jobs meant back then. No look back at the life of a powerful and famous person would be fair or complete without an honest look at some of the less noble aspects of their legacy and even some of the business mistakes they made along the way.

In a way, Jobs was with us for the remainder of the year. Just over a year after Jobs was criticized for refusing to support Flash on the iPad other iOS devices, Adobe announced that they were abandoning the development of mobile Flash all together.

A week after his death, it was announced that the iPhone 4S had broken Apple's records by selling over 1 million units in its first 24 hours on the market. It won't be the last product we'll see that Jobs had a direct hand in developing, either. The iPhone 5, iPad 3 and rumored Apple television set are all expected to launch next year, undoubtedly with a little piece of Jobs' legacy built right in.

2. Web-Fueled Global Unrest

The year 2011 started with the fall of a dictator, and ended with several more deposed and more than one global protest movement in full bloom. From the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots, the headlines in 2011 were packed with social media-fueled unrest.

Following January's revolution in Tunisia, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown after a massive rebellion that was originally organized on Facebook and that fueled in large part by the Web and social networking sites. The sentiment spread to Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain with smaller movements springing up in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and elsewhere. As 2011 comes to a close, the Arab Spring is still well underway and shows no sign of letting up, even in the face of violent and repressive reactions from governments across the Middle East and North Africa.

Borrowing a page from the book of Middle Eastern protestors, activists at the Canadian magazine Adbusters put out a call for Americans to launch their own protests against the excesses of Wall Street, income inequality and the forces that caused the U.S. financial meltdown and subsequent recession. Across the country, copycat "Occupy" protests sprung up in solidarity, with many of them turning violent.

The Occupy protests, which are sometimes criticized for lacking clear goals and strategies, have relied heavily on social media both as an organizational tool and for getting the attention of the news media. After being uprooted by police in many major cities, the Occupy movement is gearing up to enter its second phase. We suspect we'll continue to hear about it well into 2012, in newspapers, magazines, blogs and tweets.

3. Launch of the iPhone 5 / iPhone 4S

For most of 2011, Apple fans eagerly awaited something everybody was referring to as the iPhone 5. Everyone, that is, except for Apple, who on October 4 launched the iPhone 4S. The device was not the "completely redesigned" handset most were anticipating, and many expressed their disappointment online, but that didn't stop the new gadget from breaking Apple's own first-day sales records.

Year-long curiosity about Apple's next smartphone made "iPhone 5" fastest-rising searches on Google in 2011. When it finally launched, the device turned out a be a more modest iteration in the iPhone product line. Most of its specs are not especially noteworthy for a new phone. It has a faster processor and better-quality camera, both standard additions to a next generation device such as this.

The real value of the iPhone 4S was in part just an extension of the overall impact the iPhone has had on the smartphone market. This year we got a better one and Apple proved that it can still make people stand in line for these gadgets, even if its not the dramatic overhaul everybody wanted.

Around the same time as the iPhone launch, we got iOS 5, one of the biggest upgrades to Apple's mobile operating system yet. The new version of iOS features a redesigned notification system, cloud-based wireless syncing of content and apps, a digital newsstand and much else.

In terms of features, the biggest thing the 4S brought to the table was Siri. The military-grade voice-activated search and "personal assistant" feature has wowed consumers, inspired parodies and given developers a new technology to hack. Siri's broader impact on search and how far hackers will be able to push its boundaries are both yet to be seen.

What's clear now is that voice controlled mobile computing got its mass market debut this year and we've only seen the beginning of what it can do.

4. Amazon Launches The Kindle Fire and Silk

Rumors that Amazon would be launching its own tablet device swirled for a good portion of the year. Leaked details from suppliers and analyst predictions all pointed to the launch of some kind of iPad competitor. The story was all but confirmed when Techcrunch got a hands-on sneak preview of the device.

In September, Amazon launched the Kindle Fire, a 7-inch, $200 Android-based tablet geared toward reading, watching video and gaming. The gadget was far from being an iPad killer, as it was small, lacked a camera, had no accelerometer and fell short on other hardware specs. But that was beside the point. Amazon made a rather decent media tablet available at less than half the cost of the iPad.

The product's first iteration may have its shortcomings, but it's good enough to open up the tablet market to a whole new category of consumers. If its early success continues into early 2012, Apple may be forced to rethink that longstanding $500 price tag when they release the iPad 3 next year.

One feature of the Kindle Fire turned into a story all its own. Silk, its proprietary Web browser, uses Amazon's cloud infrastructure to lift some of the burden of loading pages off of the device itself and can even predict browsing habits. Early tests indicate that "cloud acceleration" may actually be slower than normal browsing, and some privacy concerns have been raised about the way Silk works. Amazon has assuaged many of those concerns already and we imagine performance will improve once the product gets past version 1.0.

5. Stop Online Piracy Act + Protect IP Act

By the end of 2011, the United States Congress had two very controversial pieces of legislation about the Internet making their way through the sausage-making process. The Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House) and the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) are both geared toward doing what their names suggest. However, the scope of power the laws would give to media conglomerates and law enforcement to shut off access to foreign websites is what has many in the Internet industry up in arms.

In short, SOPA and PIPA would allow copyright holders to ask ISPs to block access to any foreign-based website that is deemed to be illegally hosting copyrighted material. It would also force the hand of search engines, ad networks and payment processors to cut off ties with any such site.

The debate over the proposed legislation has pitted the music and big media industries against some of the biggest names in Web technology. The RIAA has lashed out at Google for opposing SOPA, while the lone tech company on the list of supporters, GoDaddy, saw a major backlash among tech influencers and consumers. This reaction ultimately led to their abandoning outright support for the bill altogether.

The saga is far from over. The next hearing on the matter has been postponed until after the new year, so expect the SOPA controversy to heat right back up in a few weeks, if it even manages to die down in the meantime.

Next Page:Google Goes Social, a Failed Merger and the Year's Biggest Privacy Scandal

6. Google+

After years of getting social networking wrong and being mocked for it, Google finally launched a product that would change the tune of tech pundits and users alike. Google+ went live in June, three months after our own Marshall Kirkpatrick broke the story that Google was getting ready to launch something called "Google Circles." The circles part, it turned out, was just one feature of the search giant's new social product. The service's model of separating social connections into specific and separate groups would be one of its key selling points and may have influenced Facebook to refine its own ability to later in the year.

Other notable features include multiple-participant video chats called Hangouts and Picasa-based photo sharing. The significant of Google+ goes well beyond what you see when you load the social network in your browser. Google has baked G+ integration into many of its major products and spread its tentacles far and wide across the Web using the "+1" button.

Google+ may still be a mystery to many mainstream users, who, if they're even aware of what Google+ is, seem perfectly happy to remain part of Facebook's 800 million users. But for a product that launched only half a year ago, the social network has seen very impressive growth. It's worth remembering that right now is essentially 2004 for Google+ in terms of where it stands in its product timeline compared to Facebook. If Google's success in the browser market it is any indication, it may be a formidable competitor in the social space before we know it.

7. AT&T Tries to Gobble Up T-Mobile, Fails

It's rare that tech news stories make their way to the network evening news. The proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile was one of those stories. In March, the telecom giant announced plans to pay $39 billion for T-Mobile, a move it said would help them improve network quality and deploy its 4G/LTE network across 95% of the country.

The U.S. Department of Justice saw things differently. Citing antitrust concerns, the government sued to block the deal in August, following in the footsteps of a group of consumers who had filed a lawsuit of their own. After much back and forth, with the prospects of the the deal's success having faded, AT&T dropped its bid to acquire T-Mobile in December.

Depending on who you asked, the merger could have improved cellular network quality in the U.S. and created new jobs or gouged consumers by creating an even more consolidated, oligopolistic telecom industry. Which view was more accurate is something we'll never know for sure.

8. Carrier IQ

We may well into 2012 by the time we know for sure what's going on with Carrier IQ. When the story broke a few weeks ago, it was the start of one of the biggest privacy-related scandals we've seen in quite some time.

Carrier IQ is intended to be used a diagnostic tool to help carriers and device manufactures optimize their networks and hardware. Yet the curious digging of developer and researcher Trevor Eckhart revealed that the application has been logging and transmitting a ton of information about what people are doing with their phones, including personal data like phone numbers dialed, URLs visited and the content of text messages.

The software is allegedly installed on a huge number of smartphones and could represent a massive privacy breach and possibly even illegal wiretapping. To some extent, the largescale capture of data about our activity is a necessary part of our digital lives. The question here is how much information Carrier IQ has been collecting and whether it is personally identifiable. Congress has demanded answers and the story is still very much evolving.

9. The IPOs: Groupon and LinkedIn Go Public

Two important Web companies filed to go public in 2011, albeit to somewhat different reactions. In January, LinkedIn became the first major social networking company to file an initial public offering. By May, the company's stock had soared to $122 per share, after starting out at $45. LinkedIn's stock price has seen its ups and downs since.

As a business, the social networking site for professionals has a few streams of revenue coming in. In addition to advertising, LinkedIn has premium memberships and paid job listings that help generate cash.

Facing a bit more controversy, daily deals frontrunner Groupon filed the biggest IPO of any U.S. Internet company since Google went public in 2004. After turning down a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google late last year, Groupon turned heads with its massive IPO. Many have questioned the integrity of the Web group-buying service's business model and whether it can maintain growth moving forward.

Internet radio and music recommendation startup Pandora also filed an IPO this year, at $100 million. The company started trading publicly in June with a valuation of $2.6 billion.

10. HP Kills the Touchpad, Abandons Mobile Hardware Business

While other tech giants were making a big splash with their tablets - Google launching Ice Cream Sandwich, Amazon's Kindle Fire, Steve Jobs unveiling the iPad 2 - an industry veteran was moving in the opposite direction.

After lackluster early sales results, Hewlett-Packard announced that it would be discontinuing the HP Touchpad tablet and all other webOS-based mobile devices. In short, it was getting out of the mobile hardware business all together.

The fate of webOS, HP's well-designed but under-appreciated mobile operating system remained unclear at first. The company said it would explore what to do with webOS, eventually settling on open sourcing it.

Steve Jobs illustration by Tim Gough

According to the January 2011 LinkedIn demographics slideshow, North American users breakdown like so: 13% are in the high tech industry, 14.8% are in finance, 10.8% are in the medical industry, 7.5% are in manufacturing and 7.1% are in corporate America.

"LinkedIn groups are great for organizing users around similar topics but there is a often a big time lag in conversation compared to engagement on other social networks," Syracuse University Social Media Professor Dr. William J. Ward (@DR4WARD) tells us. Will this new feature help LinkedIn turn groups into spaces for engaged conversation?

The poll pops up within the discussions tab of your LinkedIn Group, where fellow members can select one of the up to five options, "Like" the poll and drop in a comment. The poll creator can opt to receive an email for every new comment. Any group member can create a poll.

Members of open groups can respond to a poll without actually joining the Group. LinkedIn is testing this out with the Harvard Business Review group, which transitioned from closed to open.

LinkedIn recently launched group statistics dashboards and revamped events. Group stats are now available by demographics, growth and activity. The updated LinkedIn Events gives you a list of events you might want to check out, based on your connections and interests.

Why Isn't There More Conversation On LinkedIn?

LinkedIn does not have the kind of pop culture pull that sites like Facebook and Twitter do. It is for professionals who want to keep up on others in their field, and related news and information. Don't professionals want to start conversations too, though?

While this type of clutter avoidance is an advantage for LinkedIn, it's "also a disadvantage," @DR4Ward tells us. "People check-in less frequently so conversations occur more asynchronously and lack some of the excitement, novelty, and urgency of other social networks."

Will polls for LinkedIn change that? Tell us what you think in the comments.

In terms of social network sources that led to a job, 18.4 million Americans credit Facebook. More than 10 million and 8 million Americans credit LinkedIn and Twitter as sources that led to jobs, respectively.

The Super Social Networkers Find Jobs More Quickly

Job seekers with more than 150 contacts on any single social network are considered "super social" and have a better chance of finding work, period.

Four out of 10, or 41%, are super social on at least one social network, and especially on Facebook.

The Jobvite Social Job Seeker Survey 2011 queried more than 1200 members of the workforce, two-thirds (69 percent) of which were job seekers and people who are looking for work or employed but open to a new job.

Results from the 2010 Jobvite survey found that companies were using mostly LinkedIn (78 percent) to recruit, followed by Facebook (55 percent) and Twitter (45 percent).

Recruiters Are Using Facebook To Find Talent

LinkedIn may be innovating like mad with updated iPhone apps like CardMunch, but apps like Jobmagic are focused on helping recruiters use Facebook and other social networks to find talent. For example, Jobmagic powers a few Disney Facebook pages, including Disney Studio Careers.

Why the focus on Facebook? It's 5x bigger than LinkedIn, and has the largest engagement rate on the Web. Recruiters who use LinkedIn are less likely to locate healthcare professionals such as nurses, young professionals, hourly workers, people with income less than $75K and people without a college degree.

Are you using social networks to look for work? What's your experience been like? Tell us about it in the comments.

Cardmunch might sound like a digital recognition program, but it's not. Instead, LinkedIn uses the Amazon/mechanical Turk platform to source human transcribers.

LinkedIn acquired the CardMunch app in January, offering it as a free option to LinkedIn users.

Has the CardMunch app helped you organize your business cards? Tell us about it in the comments.

LinkedIn now tags job postings that might be best for veterans, and Google offers additional tools for the building the military veteran community online.

Today, Google launched Google for Veterans and Families, which was created by veterans who work at Google, and their families. Here, vets will find VetConnect, a tool to help vets find each other on Google+, the Google Veterans YouTube Channel, a video-focused space for connecting vets and Resume Builder powered by Google Docs. Soon, Google will launch Tour Builder powered by Google Earth, which offers a map-based way for vets to share stories about their service. While the new Google services are more focused on community than jobs, there are definite benefits to connecting with others who have shared a similar experience.

Google already joined forces with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to create a customized job search engine for veterans. It identifies veteran-focused job openings on the web using JobPosting markup from Schema.org.

Image via US Army Africa.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Groupon will be the highest-profile Web IPO since late summer.

In Groupon's SEC filing on October 21, it planned to share only 30 million shares, valuing the company at $11.4 billion. Groupon's initial filing in June 2011 expected to raise $750 million. At its highest, Groupon's IPO was valued at $20B.

In May, LinkedIn became the first of the major social networks to go public. It initially priced shares at $45; by the end of the day, they shot up to $122 each. Groupon became the second major tech company after LinkedIn to aim for the public market. Groupon launched in November 2008 and went public after three years. LinkedIn waited eight years to go public after launching in May 2003.

Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Credit Suisse Group lead the Groupon offering.

Groupon will officially go public tomorrow on Nasdaq as GRPN.

Update: Click here to follow moment-to-moment share price fluctuations.

LinkedIn appears to have found a unique position as a place for jobs and and employees to find each other and is clearly pushing to cement that role. It's building new products, like Apply Through LinkedIn job applications, and recently launched Classmates, a new, data-driven tool targeted at students and recent graduates, which its biggest growing demographic.

The earnings overview breaks down between premium subscriptions, marketing solutions and hiring solutions.

The number of members paying for premium subscriptions doubled in the last year, growing at a faster rate than other subscriptions. These accounted for 20% of revenue. Marketing solutions comprised 32% of revenue. Hiring solutions are now LinkedIn's most profitable product, making 51% of the company's revenue.

The company reports strong growth in the U.S. and internationally. It recently translated the site to Russian, Romanian and Turkish; it will be adding Japanese over the next few months.

This year LinkedIn also added more offerings for job recruiters with Talent Pipeline which helps centralize the way recruiters find, track and stay connected with potential hires and promotions.

The company bought real-time, search startup IndexTank and social contact management startup Connected.

While the mobile browser accounted for more visits, research shows that the social networking app audience has grown five times faster in the past year. While the mobile browsing social networking audience has grown 24% to 42.3 million users, the mobile social networking app audience shot up 126% to 42.3 million users in the past year.

Mobile Social Networks' Audiences: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn Come Out on Top

The Facebook mobile audience is fast approaching 60 million users. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn grew their mobile audiences by at least 50 percent in the past year. Facebook's numbers have risen 50% from the previous year to 57 million mobile users. Twitter's audience jumped 75% to 13.4 million users, and LinkedIn's mobile audience grew 69% to 5.5 million users.

What Does This Mean For Brands on Social Networks?

With the proliferation of daily deal sites, location-based social networks and sites like Groupon Now, which offer location-based deals-on-demand, it's increasingly important for brands to engage with their customers on social media. According to the comScore report, in August 2011 a total of 80.3% read posts from people they know personally, while 69.5% posted status updates from their mobile devices.

People are increasingly checking social networks more from their mobile devices. More than half (52.9%) read posts from organizations/brands/events. One of three mobile social networkers snagged a coupon/offer/deal, and twenty-seven percent clicked on an ad while visiting a social networking site.

LinkedIn Classmates also gives you the opportunity to track career trends based on where your school's alumni work, what they do and where they live now. Maybe you'll discover an alumni working at a company you're interested in applying to, or perhaps you'll notice alumni working somewhere you used to work. LinkedIn Classmates gives you access to that data quickly and easily, making it an ideal tool for gathering insights and reconnecting with individuals.

You can also find out what you have in common with those people now through graphs that chart specific interests. LinkedIn Classmates is not limited to college - it includes all of the schools you've entered into your LinkedIn profile. There's also an option to see people who attended during specific years, and those who graduated in a specific year. The least automated feature here is the option to join your alumni group - but you've already done that, right?

Alumni groups are an important part of the LinkedIn ecosystem, and are more geared toward conversation.

Some alumni prefer not to list the year they graduated, but that doesn't mean you can't find them. Using an easy toggle feature, you can grab a list of everyone who attended your school, regardless of graduation date.

To use the new feature, go to http://www.linkedin.com/classmates.

LinkedIn Classmates comes on the heels of status updates from companies, which lets administrators of company pages post short updates, just like users.