LinkedIn works overtime to stay fresh

The Life: If a week is a long time in politics, 10 years, in social media terms, feels positively ancient.

LinkedIn is based in Mountain View, California. David Paul Morris / Bloomberg
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If a week is a long time in politics, 10 years, in social media terms, feels positively ancient. While the top social network sites in 2003 - Friendster and MySpace - quickly faded in the face of new and fresher competition, LinkedIn, the networking website for professionals, continues to grow into something more than just a jobs listing site.

LinkedIn has just celebrated its 10th anniversary. Founded on May 5, 2003 from Reid Hoffman's living room in the aftermath of the original dot-com crash, LinkedIn now boasts more than 200 million users and 3,700 employees spread across 26 offices around the world.

Channels, launched this month on to the platform's social news page, brings together content around a list of general subjects from business travel to health care. Each Channel combines popular posts from a variety of news sources with those from a range of "influencers".

Replacing the Industries feature, Channels is designed to make LinkedIn appear less insular and broaden the spectrum of discussions for its users rather than focus on specific industries. For example, a topic such as entrepreneurship would have a wide appeal across a range of businesses.

LinkedIn has also announced the launch of a mobile app called CheckIn. Designed to assist and streamline recruitment, CheckIn will allow recruiters to better manage potential candidates' information while on the go. That gives recruiters time to focus on discussions with prospects instead of trying to log information manually. This is useful at large events where a recruiter could speak with more than 100 candidates throughout the day. Such developments, along with recent upgrades to its iPad and iPhone apps, keep LinkedIn fresh. The company's first-quarter sales of US$324.7 million cemented its place as the number one business-focused social network.

For now. The online world is a fickle thing, and on May 3 the company's shares fell 13 per cent as, amid concerns over the pace of advertising growth on wireless devices, LinkedIn said its revenue for the year, at $1.43 billion to $1.46bn, would fall short of analysts' expectations of $1.5bn.