I heard news from someone today that LinkedIn is about to announce that it is being acquired… but I have been unable to find any information out from a source closer to the company currently. I’ve asked a few people who work there now, but nothing all around. So I have no clue if this is a reliable rumor. But I guess if Adify is worth $300mm then LinkedIn must be worth A LOT.

Update: Matt Marshall has a story about this in Venture Beat this morning.

Word reached me today of a rumor that News Corp is to purchase LinkedIn, as relayed in TechCrunch.

It’s Saturday, so it must mean new features for LinkedIn (they release features on a Friday late afternoon typically, every second week). LinkedIn is very much about incremental improvements, which has sometimes been frustrating for people when things change around but I think on the whole it has been very good and people I talk to feel like there is a constant progress to the site. Here’s the blog entry discussing the new features which include a more newsfeed-ish like quality to the updates section (breaking things down by day, collapsing certain things the way Facebook does to get more info in there e.g. X, Y and Z have updated their profile pictures), and the ability to send notes that aren’t emails to your contacts. LinkedIn has spent a lot of time on their messaging features: I’m a big fan of this since increasingly people will find that regular email is such a deluge of spam and bacn that meta message services with good deliverability that are frequently used will help bridge the gap for a lot of people (ironically contributing to the bacn problem themselves… but… ). So continuing congrats to the LinkedIn team on the new feature adds!

One thing I’d say is that if you are waiting on a call back from a business partner and they have not done so yet despite having promised to do so some time before, and you’re a bit annoyed by it, it’s probably inappropriate for them to go ahead and invite you to join their LinkedIn network as “someone they trust”.

Reid announced on his profile today (www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman) he’s stepping aside as CEO of LinkedIn to become President of Products. Reuters picked this up since through a really useful aspect of LinkedIn, profile changes get shown on the homepages of LinkedIn users who are linked to you.

The new CEO is Dan Nye, who was formerly at Intuit when they inked a deal with PayPal in 2000. I don’t know Dan Nye, but in concept the move makes sense - Reid is a tremendous consumer Internet visionary and product guru and certainly it makes sense for him to spend his time focused on continuing the build-out and application of the LinkedIn product to professional users in the US and elsewhere.

BTW Funny to note: the Reuters article used a tinyURL to point to Reid’s profile. Speaking of which here is a link to new CEO Dan Nye’s profile, which appears to be a more recent addition to the LinkedIn database. Good luck to the new LinkedIn team, looking forward to seeing it taken to the next level!

LinkedIn has raised another $12.8 million, partially it seems to go after the European market in greater depth. GigaOM asks the question why the company needed to raise more money considering that it is profitable. And here is Reid’s response as to why…

Yes, LinkedIn is a very valuable service. I’m unashamedly biased, but nice to see these comments from David Hornik.

The average person reading this blog will not find their new job on a job board. (even setting aside all the entrepreneurs who also happen to be avid blog reader types) It’s much more likely to come from a personal referral (sometimes via LinkedIn) or via a recruiter, many of whom are using LinkedIn to source people.

The problem is not that finding the right listing via services like Indeed or SimplyHired, but having the right opportunities come to you. Most companies don’t really want to hire people who are actively looking for a job - they’d prefer to hire people who are spending their time, well, working and doing well at it. So the “passive job seeker” becomes a hot commodity: someone who is open to an overture for new employment but not actively looking, and typically is a well-regarded and not-dissatisfied member of the team at the company where they work.

Companies like LinkedIn (8.5 million users and counting) that have a lot of profile information on millions of users and some understanding of the relationship between various titles and experience levels in certain industries are well-positioned to create a ‘push’ recruiting product that would exist independently or in addition to a user-referral component. Even LinkedIn’s footprint is relatively small given the size of the US workforce - but its penetration among the higher echelons of businesspeople in the US is good - but it will take a lot longer to create a database/profile-driven recruiting marketplace given the depth and accuracy of user-provided profile information in many of these databases. I think there’s still plenty of innovation to come in this space: it may be the biggest and most difficult lead generation problem of all!

It appears that along with an aggressive global expansion, Open Business Club (OpenBC) has decided to change its name to Xing. OpenBC has led LinkedIn in adoption in Europe, and it will be interesting to see how the new brand affects things. I haven’t really used OpenBC very much, but to provide a fair disclaimer, I used to work at LinkedIn and also own LinkedIn shares, so….

This past week I started my new business development role at /ROOT Markets (my linkedin). I was previously an advisor to the company while I was GM of Advertising at LinkedIn, but was convinced by the opportunities that the company is pursuing to take on a role there. I will be spending quite a bit of time in New York as part of my new responsibilities, so look forward to getting together with many of my East Coast friends I haven’t seen in some time (except of course at those noisy, busy industry events!). People interested in following our progress should of course look at this blog, at Greg Yardley’s, Transparent Bundles and the official /ROOT blog.

The guys at Reprise Media are pretty smart — and their SearchViews blog has some great stuff on it. They put me on the hot seat recently, with 5 questions about advertising, LinkedIn and related issues…

We just beta-launched a custom apparel shop for LinkedIn stuff. Go to the LinkedIn store and create your own customized piece of LinkedIn apparel, and when you receive it send us two digital photos of you wearing it (back and front, or just of the item if you’re shy!). The reason I say this is because you can add whatever text you want to your shirt, you can also add a picture of yourself (whoa!) or other designs, play with the colors etc. It’s very flexible!

Link to the store

The coolest item photos received by 12/1/05 will receive an iPod nano in time for the holidays, as well as have their text or design (or a version thereof) made available on the shirt website! Items must feature one of the LinkedIn logos or pictures to be eligible.

The shirts are great, we made up a bunch for people here at the office. Your photos for the contest are to be sent to advertising(at)linkedin.com! Let me know what you think of our store and stuff!

Please vote for LinkedIn as a BusinessWeek “Best of the Web” in the Jobs category! Thanks much!

I recently updated my profile, as I am changing roles here at LinkedIn. I’ve switched over from the buying side to the selling side, moving to become General Manager of Advertising for LinkedIn. (see my LinkedIn profile) It should be interesting, and we’re hoping to create new targeted advertising for business professionals that they will see as value-added, not just more of the same old… stay tuned for details!

We just implemented Google Adsense ads on LinkedIn. One of the problems with Adsense is that they don’t do ads to secure environments like LinkedIn’s, so we had to build a proxy for the ads. Anyway, would like people’s feedback on this and other advertising on the site - you can just email advertising (at) linkedin.com.

Yesterday we deployed our new website look and feel and also the new subscription features (reference from Jeff Clavier here). The personal account will always be free, and allow you to access up to three degrees away as well as do a free name search in the database. For contacts 4 degrees and greater, however, you’ll need a business account to reach out to these people via “InMail”, which is the new system for getting in touch with people. The nice thing is that there is a “contact guarantee” - if people don’t respond to your InMail in a timely fashion we will withdraw it and put the credit back into your account. More details later, but we at LinkedIn are very excited about the new system and look forward to receiving your feedback!

Dave Taylor has the scoop from Konstantin Guericke (VP Marketing at LinkedIn) on the upcoming changes here at LinkedIn, including the new “InMail” system. We’re all really excited about it, and the initial response from the users and customers we’ve talked to about it is very positive!

Keith Ferrazzi has a tremendous success story posted that involves his book, his blog as well as LinkedIn! Here’s a quote from the posting:

You can imagine, I read every article, every story on a Never Eat Alone blog. One day you wrote LinkedIn.com and how it was created to help people to network with each other. I signed on LinkedIn.com and the same day began sending networking requests following the LinkedIn.com model “I am interested in working with you at your XYZ company.”

I sent only six requests. I was very nervous. People I was sending my E-mails to were high-level technology executives. They didn? know me. They were very busy people. Why would they respond? Well, I thought, maybe one will respond to my E-mail and that will be good in itself. But do you know that all six responded asking for a Word copy of my resume? I got an interview and then got a full-time job. In fact, after the interview, they created a position just for me, based on my resume! They gave me a very generous offer. The whole package was better that I ever had in my 20+ years of career in IT. And the job is located across the street from the building I live!!! I don? even have to drive to work, all I have to do is to cross the street!

Keith Ferrazzi (author of the bestselling “Never Eat Alone”) has written a great piece about LinkedIn. Ferrazzi was the youngest partner in Deloitte Consulting’s history and his book has some good business advice especially concerning networking.

We now have cost-per-click (CPC) advertising available for sale on LinkedIn. It is administered by AdBrite, and allows you to get into the sponsored link rotation when there are not all four fixed-fee ads running (these are available for sale likewise for 3, 7 and 30-day time periods). Click here to find out more and purchase your ad using a credit card… you can also target by country (in case you only want to advertise to our South African users, for example). You should be able to start seeing *some* impressions at 30c CPC, depending on other advertisers in the system. If you would like more details you can contact us at advertising (at) linkedin.com.