Social Media Portal

Status Feature Allows Users to Keep Their Network Up-to-Date On What They Are Working On

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- (BUSINESS WIRE) -- LinkedIn Corporation, the world’s largest online professional network, today announced the launch of a new home page which includes a “Status” feature to allow professionals to communicate their activities to their network.

“The status feature will provide another effective way to engage and tap into the knowledge of your network,” said Adam Nash, Senior Director of Product, LinkedIn. “For example, you might let your network know when you’re looking for advice or needing to hire someone, or when you’re planning a business trip or attending a conference.”

LinkedIn members who want to add their status to their profile can do so quickly and easily on their LinkedIn home page. Status information will be broadcast in the form of a network update to the member’s connections and will appear as a new element on the member’s profile page. To ensure privacy, LinkedIn members will have the option to control whether their status is visible to their first degree connections, their broader network of second and third degree connections, or the entire LinkedIn network. LinkedIn members can choose whether they want to see statuses in their network updates feed.

“In our experience, we’ve found that when people share thoughts and information with their professional network on LinkedIn, they receive a wealth of insight and advice from their network,” Nash added. “We expect the new status feature to take this phenomenon to the next level by increasing the frequency of that sharing.”

In addition to the status feature, LinkedIn’s redesigned home page includes several customizable modules:

• The Answers module showcases what questions your network is asking, so that you can directly contribute to the network’s knowledge and perhaps ask a question yourself.
• The People module showcases the contacts you can make through your network (by using the connections of your connections).
• The Jobs module showcases the jobs and opportunities your network can help you with.

Also included in the new home page is a continued roll-out of the LinkedIn News beta. LinkedIn News delivers news about key daily topics: a member’s company, products, industry, and competitors, drawn from more than 10,000 publishers and blogs. LinkedIn News uses the wisdom of each user's “crowd” of colleagues to determine the handful of articles that are the most important to their business — the articles they need to read that day.

About LinkedIn

LinkedIn takes your professional network online, giving you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful professional network. Currently, more than 19 million professionals are on LinkedIn, including senior-level executives from all five hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as a wide range of household names in technology, financial services, media, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, and numerous other industries. LinkedIn is backed by world-class investors including Sequoia Capital, Greylock, the European Founders Fund and Bessemer Venture Partners.