Linkedin is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. Founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of June 2013, Linked in reports more than 225 million acuired users in more than 200 countries and territories. Ok let's talk little bit about Linkedin and its start.
Linkedin's CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Inc. executive. The company was founded by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from Paypal and Socialnet.com (Allen Blue, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillant, Lee Hower, Konstantin Guericke,Stephen Beitzel, David Eves, Ian McNish, Yan Pujante and chris Saccheri). One purpos of the site is to allow registerd users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship,called connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection. However, if the invitee selects "I'dont know" or "Spam", this count against the inviter. I fthe inviter gets too many of such responses, the account may be restricted or closed.
The feature Linkedin Answers, allowed users to ask questions for the community to answer. This feature was free, and the main difference from the letter was that questions are potentially more business oriented, and the identity of the people asking and answering questions is know.
In October 2008, Linkedin enabled an "applications platform" that allows other online services to be embedded within a member's profile page. Among the tinitial application were an Amazon Reading list that allows linkedin menbers to display books they are reading, a connection to Tripit, and a six Apart, Wordpress and Typepad application that allows members to display their latest blog postings within their Linkedin Profile.
A mobile version of the site was launched in February 2008, which gives access to a reduced feature set over a mobile phone. Linkedin allows research companies with wich they may be interested in working.
When typing the same of a given company in the search box, statistics about the company are provided. In July 2011, Linkedin launched a new feature allowing companies to include an "Apply with linkedin" button on job listing pages. The new pluging will allow potential employees to apply for positions their linedin profiles as resums.
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