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During yesterday's earnings announcement, its first ever, LinkedIn employed two social Web technologies to help make the presentation more shareable, as well as to give the team peace of mind. Using a combination of free and premium services from SlideShare and StockTwits, the LinkedIn team was able to offer its slide deck as an embeddable window (which we used in our blog post) and live-tweet the earnings call without fear of losing SEC compliance.

LinkedIn is considering building a social networking tool for the workplace, along the lines of Yammer and similar tools, CEO Jeff Weiner said in the company's first earnings call earlier today.

If it does so, LinkedIn will be competing with dozens of other companies, including IBM, Jive, Microsoft (which has some social networking capabilities built into SharePoint), Socialtext TIBCO and VMware (which recently acquired SocialCast). And as we've mentioned, some see Google Plus eventually being a workplace tool as part of Google Apps.

With so many options already on the market, are you interested in the idea of using LinkedIn as an internal social network?

LinkedIn shared its Q2 earnings today in its first earnings announcement as a public company. Usage numbers are up significantly, with 115.8 million members, up 61% from Q2 2010, and 81.8 million monthly unique visitors, 83% more than last year.

Net revenue growth was not as strong, but CEO Jeff Weiner says this is due to heavy reinvestment in the growth and development of the site. LinkedIn earned $4.5 million in net income this quarter, compared to $4.3 million last year, just a 5% increase. But their top-line revenue was up considerably, more than doubling since Q2 2010. Before costs, they pulled in $121 million last quarter.

When you have enough companies trying to ride the viral invite/closed beta wave with closed betas for a business to specialize in viral invites, it's time to pull the plug. Artificial (or real) scarcity imposed by marketing as a promotional gimmick is no reason to spam your friends, folks.

This morning I reached my personal tipping point for the viral invite gimmick. I was already well poised to boil over after the U.S. launch of Spotify, but this morning another service (that I won't encourage by providing a link or name) put me over the edge. Not only is it another bogus "invite only" closed beta, but the company promises faster access if you offer up email addresses for at least three friends.

As anyone who's hired or been hired for a job in the last few years knows, social media is now a standard fixture of the recruiting process. We're constantly seeing data come out showing that sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook play an increasingly common role in hiring, and the numbers are only getting bigger.

About 89% of U.S. companies use social media for recruiting, according to new report and infograhic from JobVite, a company that makes social recruitment software. As one would suspect, LinkedIn is the biggest among social networking sites when it comes to finding and hiring new employees, a trend that's sure to continue ask LinkedIn rolls out its one-click job application button for employers.

LinkedIn has just announced a Web plug-in that lets employers add a one-click "Apply with LinkedIn" button to job postings.

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.

Searching for a job isn't easy these days: not only is the competition greater with more people out of work, but also employers are being pickier. And while social networks make connecting with potential hiring managers somewhat easier, there are still lots of different networks to choose from. Today the site Monster.com hopes to make life a bit easier by announcing a new tool called SeeMore that is designed for recruiters to use semantic search methods to collect resumes from a variety of sources, both internal databases as well as online ones.

By now you know that using social media is an essential part of running any-sized business, but how do you take those first baby steps towards learning about various services such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others? The mailing list provider Constant Contact has put together an excellent site called the Social Media Quickstarter here that is chock full of tutorials and step-by-step directions, along with blog entries on best practices, suggestions, a few podcasts, and other instructional materials.

Open-Xchange began its life as a hosted email service but has since evolved with a twist: its engineers have figured out a relatively simple process to extract your contacts from Facebook and LinkedIn. It is based on the SaaS pay hosted service, but there is a free service you can use for your contact extraction.

So if you are trying to migrate a bunch of your contacts into Google+, or move from Facebook to someplace else, you might have found that this isn't an easy process.

LinkedIn announced today its LinkedIn Groups API, available in JavaScript or REST flavors. The new API will enable developers to embed functionality from Groups into other applications.

As an example, Microsoft used the API to embed discussions from LinkedIn on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011 event website.