6 new LinkedIn updates you need to know about

Before discussing the new, exciting changes coming from LinkedIn, let’s define what LinkedIn is:
LinkedIn is really a huge database of professionals.  Unlike other social networks, like Twitter, which lacks profile depth, or Facebook, which is all over the place demographically and is also hard to find people, Linkedin standardizes information entered by users into predefined “Profile Headline”, “Summary”, “Education”, “Company”, etc. categories.  In addition to this huge database of information, LinkedIn provides an awesome search tool to allow you to pinpoint the person you are looking for depending on a number of very specific factors.


I read an outstanding update about LinkedIn and 6 new LinkedIn updates and thought I would share

1. ‘LINKEDIN TODAY’ IS A NEW PAGE YOU SHOULD VISIT EVERY DAY: LinkedIn.com/today, a new mashup of LinkedIn and Twitter, is one of the most useful ways to start your mornings. As one of the new LinkedIn updates, it displays, in an easy-to-read, easy-to-share and easy-to-save manner, the most shared items among your LinkedIn contacts. It’s also broken up by industries you are interested in, which makes it even more useful professionally.

2. THE NEW RESUME BUILDER IS VERY USEFUL: One of my favorite new LinkedIn updates is the Resume Builder at resume.linkedinlabs.com. It takes your LinkedIn profile and creates an instant, customizable resume that you can save as a PDF or share on the web with privacy settings. There are several templates to choose from, including “classic,” “business,” “law” and more. Here’s my new resume, (which I haven’t done any editing or customization on yet); you can compare it to my LinkedIn profile at LinkedIn.com/in/sreenivasan. (A tip about the profile URL that I learned from LinkedIn’s Krista Canfield, who teaches journalists on using the service better: try to customize it with your full name, not just your last name — since that’s how LinkedIn’s search engine work. I need to fix mine).

3. LINKEDIN LABS HAS COOL FEATURES: LinkedIn’s experimental Labs page at LinkedInLabs.com, which hosts the Resume Builder, is filled with new things you’ll want to check out. Among them: InMaps at inmaps.linkedin.com, which makes visualizations of your network (see my wife’s above); Swarm at swarm.linkedinlabs.com, which shows you the most searched companies; Year In Review at yir.linkedinlabs.com, which shows you who among your connections changed jobs in a year; in 2009, 607 people in my network changed jobs; in 2010, 922 people did; so far 267 have done so in 2011).

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