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Web technology that replicates clunky, analog methods for organizing and interacting with information is a terrible practice and we're glad to see one more example of it departing the Internet with LinkedIn's new address book functionality hitting the site today.

While still in beta, the new function looks like a leap ahead of the old Rolodex-style functionality we've become used to never using.

Whether we're tweeting the minutiae of our daily lives from our cell phones, checking out the latest band pages on Myspace, chatting with friends on Facebook, looking up old high school buddies on Classmates or networking with colleagues on LinkedIn, we're spending more and more time on social networking sites than ever before. Leading the pack, of course, are the usual suspects: Facebook and Twitter.

As a matter of fact, according to Nielsen, we're spending 82% more time on social networking sites than we did just a year earlier.

Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks a lot like a less elegant, less customizable version of the Facebook iPhone app. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company's mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social-media-messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you're looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it's a work in progress and will improve soon.

TweetDeck, the most popular third-party Twitter client on the market today, just got a major update. TweetDeck now features support for Twitter lists and Twitter's new geolocation feature, as well as a LinkedIn column and optional support for Twitter's new retweet function. Users who prefer to use old-style retweets can still use these as well. For now, TweetDeck geolocation feature doesn't allow you to update your location from the desktop. This feature will soon be part of TweetDeck's iPhone app, which will be updated in the next few weeks.

A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn's somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. ("I vomited on their shoes at the office party" isn't on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog, and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn's categories.

You'll find them below... but they're only a starting point. Kindly add yours in the comments, and maybe - just maybe - they'll be coming soon to a form field near you.

One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn's brand-new API is Sobees, whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees' clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Two years and a month after announcing that it would launch a more professional-looking developer platform than the wildly successful one at Facebook, LinkedIn today finally opened up a series of application programming interfaces for other companies to build on top of. Make no mistake about it, though - there's some good news and there's some bad news.

LinkedIn holds an incredibly useful body of data about its users - not just because of the relatively high net worth it brags about its users having but because employment information is a very useful way to put a person in context on the web. That data is now available for an ecosystem of other developers to incorporate; TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbit and several other applications already have.

Twitter and LinkedIn are announcing a deal tonight that will allow LinkedIn users to publish status updates to their Twitter profiles and pull in some or all Twitter updates to their LinkedIn accounts.

Wait a minute...the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We're still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon - that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

Some LinkedIn users will have noticed a change to the navigation and user interface of the LinkedIn.com website, announces a company blog post. The business-focused social network is in the process of rolling out an updated design that aims to improve and simplify site navigation while also offering a cleaner, less-cluttered look. Does the fresh coat of paint hit the mark?

Updated at 11:30 PST with comment from LinkedIn. One million new people signed up for LinkedIn accounts already this month, taking the professional social network past the 50 million user mark. LinkedIn has some of the most valuable user data in all of social networking, not just because its members are disproportionately wealthy, but because the site is one of the only places you can find a person's occupational information and history.

"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.

If you're a hiring manager, marketer or journalist, you know how important it is to have leads. Those of us who've been on the hunt for good sources and staff have often resorted to bookmarking portfolios and saving them for a later date. Today, LinkedIn announced Profile Organizer- a service that offers premium users a chance to bookmark and annotate the profiles that interest them most.

A month-long poll conducted on business social network LinkedIn has uncovered some fascinating numbers concerning social media platforms and brand presence. The biggest surprise was that Twitter was deemed more important to brands than LinkedIn, and the poll was performed on LinkedIn. With more than 3,600 respondents so far, each well understood in terms of job titles, company size, age and gender - this is a high-quality data set worth paying attention to. The question asked was simply: "What is the most important new platform for brands to master?" Options were Twitter, Facebook, the iPhone, Digg and LinkedIn.

Some of the conclusions were a real surprise. Others confirmed our suspicions. Read on for charts, bullet points and a few thoughts.

Full Disclosure: this is an opinionated rant. Why do I have to go to LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to send messages? Why do people insist on using these non-standard messaging systems? If people said, "Don't call me on the telephone -- I prefer the delephone," you would think they were crazy. For a while, this was a minor inconvenience, but now it is starting to get out of control.

According to a new report (PDF) from uptime monitoring service Pingdom, Facebook and MySpace, the two largest players in the social networking market, had very little downtime in 2008. Twitter, whose iconic Fail Whale adorned the service far too often at the beginning of the year, got its act together and was only down for 12 minutes in December. LinkedIn, on the other hand, saw an increased rate of outages in the course of the year.

The share of adult internet users who are involved in social networking online has more than quadrupled in the past four years in the U.S. In 2005, only 8% of adults had a social network profile. As of December 2008, that number was 35%. What motivates those in older generations to go online? Is it the opportunity to professionally network with their colleagues? The answer may surprise you.

Commentary on this week's management changes at LinkedIn implied that a shake-up was needed to make LinkedIn more like Facebook. As somebody who has used LinkedIn extensively and spoken to many people who have also found it very useful, this is a plea to listen to users and not the Valley cognoscenti. Sure, when Facebook was "valued" at $15 billion, a bit of envy was understandable. But now that we're in the real world...

Enterprise adoption of cloud computing, SaaS, and social media (whatever you want to call it) is accelerating. This is a healthy market, in which vendors are doing well in a tough economy. As we near the end of a year that will go down in history with the words "meltdown," "panic," "crisis," and "depression" attached, it is time to celebrate the winners in this market, enterprise-focused web products that are already doing well and poised for even greater success in 2009. And if these products excite you, we invite you to subscribe to the ReadWriteWeb Enterprise Channel.

What hot events should I attend in my industry? That's a frequently asked question in many professional conversations. LinkedIn today offers a great way to answer that question with the launch of its new Events feature.

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.

Last week LinkedIn announced an additional infusion of capital from strategic investors. The company has been around since 2003 and Bernard Lunn recently wrote an in-depth analysis of the LinkedIn business here on ReadWriteWeb. Most of us use LinkedIn a few times a week, yet almost no one is emotionally connected to the company. Isn't it strange that a brand which at its core is about connecting people, is rather bland and unexciting? LinkedIn as a company and brand has never paid attention to the human factor.

LinkedIn has always served a very specific purpose in the business community: helping you find a new job. That utility came in a variety of flavors: posting your resume, looking through job listings, answering questions in hopes of highlighting your intellect, or getting in touch with former co-workers in hopes of landing a new gig. Up to this point, LinkedIn has remained focused but - apart from those invitations to connect - not especially social or dynamic.

With the launch of the LinkedIn Applications platform, they're hoping to change that by helping "over 30 million professionals on LinkedIn to communicate, collaborate, and share information even better than before." But they still remain focused on one thing: helping you find a new job.