Announcing LinkedIn News, Redesigned Homepage & More

LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, is trying to establish itself as a better destination with a stronger presence on the web. A new homepage, with a focus on providing users with reasons to return more often, is under development and meant to turn LinkedIn into a better destination. A “beta” version of this homepage will go live for a subset of LinkedIn users this Monday. The three homepage components meant to entice users back to the site include on-site messaging, news articles from around the web, and “network updates” (i.e. a news feed). On-site messaging is not new but will now enjoy prime real estate on the homepage, with the inbox sitting on the top of everything else. The news feed, which will be given third greatest prominence, will display the network activity of people in your network. Most notable is a new feature that will display headlines from around the web which may be of professional interest to you. Unlike the early version of this system that Erick stumbled upon, the most recent iteration of LinkedIn’s news aggregator - the one featured on this beta homepage - will not require any manual training. It will rely on its own algorithms to automatically determine what you may be interested in reading, in part using the history of what other people in your network have read to make its selection (LinkedIn is not disclosing what service it actually uses to aggregate all the headlines in the first place). News articles will be filterable by topics such as: most read, company, competitors, and industry. More interesting to me is LinkedIn’s attempt to build a stronger presence on the web by providing an API, previously disclosed but until now without any real details available. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/09/linkedin-api-and-new-homepage-drawing-near/

http://blog.linkedin.com/blog/2007/12/announcing-link.html