While I was busy traveling around the country last week, LinkedIn was busy announcing new partnerships and new features. On Monday LinkedIn announced that they would be partnering with the New York Times. Their partnership enables two new features: the ability to receive targeted news headlines and the addition of LinkedIn to the Times’ share feature.

The targeting of articles is based on your profile information that you’ve entered on LinkedIn. The primary source of information is your industry. Once activated, you will see up to five articles that are relevant to your industry as embedded as illustrated below:

Unfortunately I haven’t tested out the new feature so I can’t tell you how well it works but the concept of targeted news is not a foreign one. For example the Seen This application on Facebook, enables users to find news relevant to them based on what their friends are reading. This is a big partnership for LinkedIn though as it could also help increase the number of new user registrations.

Last week LinkedIn also announced that they would begin offering the site in Spanish. This is the first new language that the site has launched in. In comparison to other social networks, LinkedIn has been relatively slow on the foreign language front. Both Facebook and MySpace have launched in multiple languages. Thanks to Facebook’s translations application, the site has been translated into 15 languages to date.

Finally, LinkedIn announced that they will begin integrating with Xobni, which has been hailed as the most useful email add-on, and LexisNexis. The partnership with Xobni emphasizes something I was discussing almost two weeks ago: the social platform race is really a race to my contact list. The faster that these companies can make my contact list accessible anywhere, the faster that they make my reliance on them as a service more critical.

While the Facebook news last week may have quieted some of LinkedIn’s buzz, the new partnerships did not go unheard. LinkedIn is still clearly one of the primary competitors in the social platform wars. Last week’s announcements by the company emphasizes their continued dedication to rapid expansion.

Last week LinkedIn quietly launched their new LinkedIn Direct Ads service. LinkedIn Direct Ads is a similar service to that which is currently offered by Facebook via their SocialAds program. LinkedIn’s offering targets based on age, gender, industry, and seniority of ad viewers. As pictured in the image below, advertisements show up above the fold. Additionally, these advertisements are currently limited to the United States.

One thing that was substantially different from SocialAds is that the owner of advertisements is displayed next to ads. As the Direct Ads documentation reads, “LinkedIn DirectAds feature your name and a link to your LinkedIn profile on advertisements that you purchase. We want to provide LinkedIn members who view your advertisement with as much transparency and visibility into the advertiser as is appropriate for our community.”

Currently the minimum order for advertisement purchases is $25 and it appears that ads are charged based on a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions). While there has been no test of the advertisements run on this system versus Facebook Ads, this systems has been positioned as a direct competitor. I’m not so sure that the CPM model will wok in the long run though.

Thanks to Rob Webb for the heads up.

LinkedIn has raised $53 million from Bain Capital Ventures giving the company a $1 billion valuation. The company has experienced massive growth over the past year. 319 percent to be exact according to statistics released in April. While the company is a fraction of the size of Facebook, the company has an extremely targeted user base with high average household incomes and a higher median age then most of the large social networks.

A good analogy would be that LinkedIn is the Wall Street Journal of social networks. There’s no clear path for LinkedIn from here but there is a lot of buzz surrounding their soon to be released platform which is expected to attract the attention of premium brands. LinkedIn has now raised a total of $80 million. Don’t expect them to start selling virtual goods anytime soon though.

LinkedIn appears to be focused on building out their rapidly expanding user base. There had been substantial speculation that the company would get acquired by News Corp to integrate into the Wall Street Journal. Based on the recent round of financing any partnership between the two companies will most likely be delayed.

The social networking space continues to heat up with new rounds of financing by the industry leaders. It will be interesting to see how this all transforms over the next 6 to 12 months as the focus shifts to cross-platform communication and integration. Oh and lets not forget monetization.

As I’ve been writing over the past couple days, LinkedIn is rumored to be in the middle of a round of fundraising which values the company at $1 billion. Many were wondering what that money would be used for though. Eric Eldon is reporting that LinkedIn may use the money to try and enter the enterprise software space, extending beyond their existing social networking model.

This would make a lot of sense considering the demographic currently on LinkedIn. There are also a lot of services that LinkedIn could build into their site. As Eric speculates, it could include a competing software service to Salesforce.com. I doubt this though considering Salesforce.com is one of LinkedIn’s platform launch partners. What do I think is more likely?

I would argue that LinkedIn would be a great platform for building out a conference management platform. The site should dominate everything related to professional networking. As of now, they have added few features since they launched almost 5 and a half years ago. While they have upgraded the design and have added answers and company profile pages, it has been an extremely slow evolution.

This hasn’t hurt the site’s growth though. If anything it may have potentially furthered the site’s phenomenal growth over the past 12 months. While LinkedIn’s purpose of a new round is completely speculation at this point, entering the software as a service space makes a lot of sense especially since they have millions of users available to directly market to.

Yesterday I “revealed” LinkedIn’s plan for global domination. While it wasn’t much of a plan and instead a confession of my belief that LinkedIn will be extremely successful with their platform, there was a lot of buzz surrounding LinkedIn yesterday. Venturebeat began a rumor that LinkedIn might get acquired due to a board meeting going over.

Later in the day Techcrunch reported that there was some legitimacy to the rumors saying that their sources informed them that LinkedIn was being pitched by Allen & Co. at $1 billion for a new round of venture financing. The round was being led by Dave Wehner who led the sale of Bebo for $850 million to AOL.

This is pretty big news as the valuation of top social networking sites continues to skyrocket. As I mentioned yesterday, LinkedIn has been receiving CPM (cost per thousand views) ad rates as high as $75. As of yet, this is probably the highest rate in the industry and much of it is due to the premium demographic that they are targeting. While I’m not quite sure why the company needs to raise more money, a $1 billion valuation is completely reasonable given Facebook’s recent $15 billion valuation.

There’s no word on when a possible round would be closing but it will be interesting to see if this speculation turns out to be true.

Last May, Facebook announced that they were launching their platform for any developer to build applications on top of the Facebook social network. The opportunity was too big to give up and almost immediately, Facebook had an onslaught of 60,000 developers all trying to get a piece of the action. A few developers became overnight millionaires leaving others to continue their search for gold.

Almost a year later, many developers still haven’t found their gold and Facebook is still left trying to figure out how they are going to begin making serious cash flow that justifies their $15 billion valuation. It appears that LinkedIn may have taken advantage of the shadow cast by Facebook as the press and blogosphere buzzed about everything Facebook (myself included).

I at one point went so far as to suggest that LinkedIn would soon see its end as Facebook took up its role as the social network of choice for professionals. Boy was I wrong! As I wrote last week, LinkedIn’s growth has surpassed Facebook. Not only did their growth surpass Facebook but according to Alley Insider, LinkedIn is also earning CPMs as high as $75.

Whether or not the numbers are true, LinkedIn has figured out a way to capitalize on their highly valuable user base. I would suggest that they are about to further this with the launch of their application platform. A few months back they announced a few launch partners including Salesforce.com, but stated that even at its full capacity, platform developers would be limited as well as applications.

Get ready to see applications that provided extended utility with mobile phone integration, applications that promote high end goods and services (AMEX, Ritz Carlton, etc) and apps that help your overall experience on LinkedIn a better one. While they will never be as large as Facebook or Myspace, they have no need to be. They can always point at Facebook and Myspace and argue that those two platforms are for games whereas LinkedIn is for business.

There’s no way around this and businesses are also taking note. Different platforms work for different demographics and while Facebook would like to have the largest mapping of the social graph, the reality is that business connections are still taking place on LinkedIn. As long as LinkedIn can keep their platform strictly for business and can maintain their select demographic profile, they will continue to produce more value per user on the site.

Mario Sundar, the community evangelist for LinkedIn, has posted a chart of Nielsen’s March ratings which shows LinkedIn surpassing Facebook in growth. According to Nielsen, LinkedIn grew a whopping 319 percent since last year. This is in comparison to Facebook which grew almost 100 percent.

Percentages can be misleading though and these numbers also can be highly inaccurate as show with Google’s recent quarter and Comscore’s blunder. The report shows that Facebook only had approximately 25 million users in March, whereas Compete.com says Facebook had 31 million unique viewers the same month. No matter what numbers you look at though, LinkedIn is experiencing phenomenal growth.

This could be a direct result of the growth of social networking sites into demographics that traditionally stay away from social networking. As I wrote about this morning, the Boomer generation has an increasing number of people on social networks. Users over 45 now account for a whopping 31 percent of LinkedIn’s user base. Which demographic is experiencing the most growth though is currently an unknown.

Whatever the case, social networking is still booming and LinkedIn has proven its ability to experience continued growth even in the face of Facebook where business networking in now pervasive. Perhaps not all social networks need their own platform!

LinkedIn will be launching company directory pages today. The pages show employees from the company as well as company data which has been compiled by Capital IQ. Aside from the addition of company data, these new pages are pretty much the same thing as network pages within Facebook. The only difference is that other people can view the pages without being members.

I’ve discussed this before, social networks are transforming the way that businesses find new employees. A college student trying to figure out which company to go join when they graduate (if that’s what they want to do), can simply do a search in Facebook and find all the employees that work there. After browsing through some of the employee profiles they can get a pretty good feeling for if that company is a place they want to work.

While I think these directory pages are a great addition, I don’t think LinkedIn profiles give you much insight to the personalities of the individuals. Instead they are promotional tools to simply display how connected you are as well as what type of clients you have worked with (via their recommendations system). As such, I think a lot of these features would be better leveraged on Facebook. Do you think these new pages are useful?

Image via Caroline McCarthy

Last night Mark Hendrickson broke the news that LinkedIn would update their design. The new design heavily resembles Facebook’s design including the color scheme. There are some critical differences but for the most part, these changes reflect a shift toward the addition of features that have been native to Facebook since the beginning. LinkedIn will add status updates, more granular privacy settings and more prevalent group features.

So are LinkedIn and Facebook going to end up being direct competitors? Potentially. Facebook started with college students and LinkedIn started with professionals but both of their networks are now overlapping. When I return from a conference I add new contacts to both LinkedIn and Facebook as well as my own personal database because I have no idea which social network I’ll end up using 10 years from now.

Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn has posted a video of the new changes (which is posted below) on the LinkedIn blog. The new features are moving toward a similar interface to Facebook. Facebook is known for its clean user interface and it may soon become the standard interface for social networks in general. Check out the video below for more details on the interface changes to LinkedIn:

LinkedIn just released “5 Tips to Jumpstart your Career in 2008.” Naturally interested, I took a look, and was relatively pleased with what I saw in the headings, but a bit disappointed to see that it was mostly flouting its own services. In any case, with the New Year rolling around, it’s a great time to start thinking about how we brand ourselves online. As times change, our online presence is becoming all the more important. I see my college friends, who are now teachers, still posting their drunken party pictures on Facebook.

I also see lawyers adding clients on Facebook that shouldn’t know about one another, which could constitute enough of a breach of confidentiality to risk the lawyer’s career. On the other hand, I see a brand new, massive opportunity for professionals to market themselves online. The trick is to remove the unprofessional things from your online identity, and to be meticulously aware of how you present yourself.

LinkedIn recommends that you work to build your own brand online. This has never been more true than today. Bloggers and YouTubers have become quasi-celebrities virtually overnight. I’m personally good friends with the “bridezilla” girls, whose YouTube hoax landed them spots on Good Morning America and a few big late night shows.

Once you have people’s eyes and ears, the potential for business and to help your career is massive, and there are tons of places online to make yourself known. To the authors of the LinkedIn article, this means using their site. Perhaps it’s a good place to start.

LinkedIn recommends that you be at the forefront of people’s minds. With people glued to the internet these days, it’s a great time to remind them that you’re the person who does what you do. It’s important to add old friends and acquaintances, and to broaden your network of people who know who you are, so in time they can know that you’re the #1 person for you line of work. If people see you as someone who is well connected with something impressive or important to say, it could work wonders for your career in the long run.

The article suggests that you make smarter decisions. Essentially they mean to draw off of the knowledge that you can get from others online, as opposed to trying to appear to be the expert. There’s a fine balance between seeming like you know what you’re doing, and seeming like you’ll pretend in any case.Learn from the people around you, act humbly, and don’t let stupid arguments end relationships. Re-read your e-mails 3 times before you send them, and stay away from MSN for very highly charged discussions.

LinkedIn says that you should prioritize your time. That means you should use their services to research the professionals you work with so you’re fully prepared when you meet with them. This is indeed quite true. When working on projects in general it is very important to know who is championing your project in the background. Who the potential benefactors are and generally who who have to woo in the process?

Keep in mind people will also research you. That’s why it’s all the more important to vigilantly filter what makes it into your online identity.Lastly LinkedIn suggests that you stay on top of your industry. It’s true. Changes are happening very quickly, and the group of people in the know is generally small but accessible. A ton of people are talking about Facebook apps and development, yet the forums are relatively silent.

Get into forums and discussions related to your line of business, keep yourself caught up, and make yourself known to the others! It will pay dividends in the long run, I promise. When I do business with a new person who I meet online, which is happening more and more, the first thing I do is check out their profile on LinkedIn and other networking sites to see who they know, how connected they are, etc.

Keep this in mind, realize that people are checking up on you, and give them something to look at that will make them want to work with you. Show them you’re connected, show them you’re intelligent, show them what you do. Just take my advice and be careful: many things online can’t be taken back once sent, and people may have the ability to post things on your profile that you wouldn’t want people seeing.

-Jonathan Kleiman