LinkedIn

LinkedIn announced the launch of a new platform which enables the developers and website publishers to add content from LinkedIn social network. This option is much like Facebook Connect option.  

Warren Buffet, a 80-years old American billionaire, warned investors against sinking their money into replete social networking companies. Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, Buffett advised investors to be wary of social media valuations, according to a report from the Bloomberg news service.

"Most of them will be overpriced," Buffet reportedly said, though he didn't specify which companies he was referring to. "It's extremely difficult to value social-networking-site companies. Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest."

An Internet social network for professionals LinkedIn is launching its own newspaper that will include articles being shared by the members. The social networking website announced that it creates a customized online newspaper from what the 90 million users are reading online.

Dubbed LinkedIn Today the new service will display excerpts of the most popular articles in various industries, in a move that the company hopes will spur users to interact more on its website.

According to LinkedIn, more than one million messages are shared by members of the network every day.

Instead of sending heavy spam traffic cyber crooks now use targeted attacks via social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, according to the report made by Cisco security executive Tom Grills.

"2010 was the first year spam volumes went down," Gillis said during an onstage interview at DEMO Spring 2011. "Does that mean spam is less of a problem? No."

Now spammers view Facebook and other social networking websites as more effective tool to launch attacks targeted at certain companies or people.

China has blocked yet another social networking site in its country. This time it was LinkedIn. The move is tied to Chinese government efforts to suppress mention of a "Jasmine Revolution" on the Internet.

Starting Friday morning the site is inaccessible from Beijing reporting an error message. Meantime, LinkedIn confirmed that the site has been blocked for some users in the country.

"This appears to be part of a broader effort in China going on right now, involving other sites as well," said Hani Durzy, a Linkedin spokesman.

In its "Security Threat Report 2011" security vendor Sophos said that there is a significant gap between reports of malware coming from social networking websites and the potential threat perceived by businesses.

According to the data for December 2010 malware from the social networking sites hit 40% of users, up from 21.2% in April 2009 and 36% in December of 2009. Phishing is also on the rise, reaching 43% of social networking users in December 2010, up from 21% in April 2009 and 30% in December 2009, the report says.

According to a new study from the website performance monitor AlertSite the fastest among major social networking websites was Facebook during the third quarter. Meantime, LinkedIn had the best uptime.

eMarketer has published results of the survey recently conducted by recruiting platform Jobvite. The results are really interesting. So, according to the information gathered by Jobvite almost 73,3% of the companies which participated in the survey acknowledged that they search for their employees online, namely in social networks. 9,3% of the surveyed companies just thinking of starting to find employees on social networking sites, 3,5% said that they do not know and only 13,8% of the firms answered negatively to the question.

According to new research from E-Consultancy, in association with the Online Marketing Summit, the use of social media by businesses has increased significantly but when it comes to their efforts most businesses are still in experimental stage.

Microsoft is widening its users’ services choice by adding social networking services, including LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace, to Outlook.  So company’s users got an ability to check social networking information in their inbox.

 Two largest social networks LinkedIn and Twitter have partnered to allow users of both services to cross-file to each other by checking a box on either Twitter or LinkedIn.

According to a co-founder of Twitter Allen Blue members of LinkedIn can automatically post recent Tweets if they want. Besides, the users will have the option to send only those materials to Twitter which they select.

Apart from increasing the audience for either tweets or LinkedIn information Blue cited several other advantages of the deal.

 Richard Ketchum, the chief executive of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), said on Wednesday that the financial regulators are facing serious challenges posed by social networking sites as more and more businesses express their desire to communicate with their customers through Facebook and LinkedIn websites.