Professional social network LinkedIn just reported stronger than expected fourth quarter 2011 earnings today. Earnings came in at $0.12 per share. Revenue for the fourth quarter was $167.7 million, an increase of 105% compared to $81.7 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Net income for the fourth quarter was $6.9 million, compared to net income of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. Analysts expected the company to earn $0.07 per share on revenues of $159.72 million.

Non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter was $13.3 million, compared to $5.2 million for the fourth quarter of 2010. For the full year 2011, revenue increased 115% to $522.2 million from $243.1 million.

“Q4 once again exceeded our expectations for member engagement and business growth. It was a fitting end to a memorable year in which we reinforced our position as the pre-eminent professional network on the web,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn in a release. “We believe continued focus on our members and technology infrastructure positions us well for accelerated product innovation in 2012.”

In terms of revenue breakdown, sales from Hiring Solutions products totaled $84.9 million, an increase of 136% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. Hiring Solutions revenue represented 50% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 44% in the fourth quarter of 2010.

Revenue from Marketing Solutions products totaled $49.5 million, an increase of 77% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and represented 30% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 34% in the fourth quarter of 2010). Premium Subscriptions revenue totaled $33.3 million, an increase of 87% compared to the fourth quarter of 2010 (and was 20% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011, compared to 22% in the fourth quarter of 2010).

By geographic area, revenue from the U.S. totaled $112 million, and represented 67% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011. Revenue from international markets totaled $55.8 million, and represented 33% of total revenue in the fourth quarter of 2011.

LinkedIn is now adding two new members every second, and just hit 150 million members (up from 135 million last November) in over 200 countries and territories.

In terms of guidance, revenue for the first quarter of 2012 is projected to be in the range of $170 million to $175 million and revenue for the full year will be in the range of $840 million to $860 million.

LinkedIn is past the excitement of the public offering and now coming into its own as a public company. As Weiner recently told TechCrunch, “The event itself was memorable, but for us it was really just a stepping stone.” The fourth quarter was relatively quiet with regard to new products compared to past quarters. The network debuted a new version of business card organizer CardMuch (which they acquired in early 2011), and updated Groups with new functionality.

LinkedIn also announced Talent Pipeline, a new product that allows recruiters and hiring managers to manage, track, and stay in touch with active and passive candidates, regardless of source. Talent Pipeline is currently in pilot testing phase with select Hiring Solutions customers, according to the company.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that LinkedIn is slowing down. We hear there’s much more in store for the company for 2012, especially in mobile. Steve Sordello, CFO of LinkedIn, said in the release that the company will “continue to invest in our product, engineering, and sales infrastructure to capitalize on our long-term opportunity” in 2012. It will also be interesting to see how acquisitive LinkedIn is in the coming year. The company just picked up contact manager Rapportive for $15 million.

Here are our notes from the earnings call:

Weiner said that member engagement was at record levels in 2011, and the site passed the 150 million milestone. Member page views grew 77 percent in the fourth quarter and unique member visits to LinkedIn in Q4 grew 67% year over year. 60 percent of LinkedIn members are located outside of the U.S. Mobile account for 15 percent of total visits to the site.

He says there are more than 50,000 developers using LinkedIn APIs to help build and power the professional Web.

In terms of future product strategy, LinkedIn’s approach will focus on simplicity, and we can “expect refreshes of pillar products.” Membership growth is another area the where LinkedIn will focus. And the company will invest in mobile, which Weiner says is the company’s fastest growing service.

LinkedIn ended the year with more than 2,000 employees. In 2012, LinkedIn will be ramping up hiring at the university and college level.

Sordello adds that one-third of members visited LinkedIn during the quarter. The company also added 1,900 enterprises to its premium products client base in 2011.

Q: Jeff-when you think 2-3 three years out what do you see as the future for offering a SaaS platform for recruiting or an ad network, while leveraging data?

A: Our current recruiting process currently already leverages data and is a SaaS product. In terms of marketing solutions, we see similar benefits. Data is one of the most valuable assets for the company. LinkedIn today is doing very well, and 300,000 publishers have the LinkedIn share button on their sites.

Q: How do you monetize mobile?

A: We’re focused on product for now, we’re going to start to run some tests with regard to advertising and marketing in mobile platforms.

Q: Other companies in the hiring space have seen softness in some verticals like finance; can you comment on this? Also can you elaborate on your student growth as well?

A: We haven’t seen any weakness in a particular vertical. The student demographic is our fastest growing demographic. We’re also increasing outreach to university career centers.

Q: Can you talk about hiring solutions internationally?

A: Europe is a year to two behind the U.S. in terms of penetration and Asia is probably 2-3 years behind.

Q: Who are some of your largest hiring solutions companies?

A: We have 70-80 percent of the Fortune 100.

Q: Can you give us additional color on mobile traction? Tablet vs. smartphone vs. iPhone. vs. Android?

A: We announced that CardMuch has generated its 2 millionth card scan a few weeks ago, and growth is accelerating. We’re seeing a sharp rise in activations across iOS platform and Android. Both are growing at healthy rates.

When it comes to networking, there is no shortage of ways to connect with other professionals to talk shop. LinkedIn has become the most popular professional networking platform, with over 100 million users using the site to post their work experience, look for jobs, and connect with prospective employers. Facebook, too, has its own professional social network in BranchOut, or you can try startups like Identified or just go for some good old fashioned meetups.

Yet, when it comes to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community, there traditionally haven’t been many substantial resources for gay professionals to network and make business connections, especially with other gay professionals. So, in mid-2010, Bill Stewart and Richard Klein co-founded dot429 to help address this problem. Tagging itself the “Gay LinkedIn,” the San Francisco startup set out to build a platform that would offer gay professionals a more robust alternative option to networking on LinkedIn.

While discrimination and intolerance remain entrenched across the planet, dot429 Founder and CEO Richard Klein tells us that the LGBT movement has been on the brink of a new era, as it transitions “from acceptance to cultural leadership.” Klein said that, as a result, gay professionals are increasingly looking for richer ways to help connect their careers and their lives, and both the community and the country at large are at a point where a network facilitating this kind of connectivity has the chance to make an impact.

And in that sense, dot429 is aiming to be more than just the “gay LinkedIn,” as its service has become a hybrid: Part social network, part LinkedIn, part events company and publishing platform. Klein says that there is a need — not just for the LGBT community — to capture the networking happening on LinkedIn and connect it with offline environments, which is why dot429 is playing host to “produced, polished, and professional” live events intended to connect content and people both through work and in their offline lives. It’s a similar idea to the one that inspired Meetup.com, and many others.

Klein also sees a lot of opportunity for in the market for a startup like dot429, owing in part to the virtual absence of any large national competitors. While there are strong local groups, and organizations like Startout (a non-profit focused on LGBT entrepreneurs) as well as the U.K.’s Jake, which targets professional gay men, many of these are offline-focused. But, Klein says that, in the end, he sees these groups as collaborators, rather than competitors, working behind one cause.

With its mission and market opportunity, dot429 was able to raise $500K in seed funding in 2010, and is in the process of raising a multi-million series A round. The startup’s community has also been growing fast, and today stands at over 60,000 people, something that has not gone unnoticed by brands, as dot429 has struck partnerships with prominent brands like FIAT, Saks Fifth Avenue, Infinity, and General Motors — to name a few.

These partnerships have become an increasingly important source of revenue for dot429, and Klein says that the startup is in the process of bringing on whole slew of others. In terms of monetization, the CEO says that the team is also considering introducing a premium membership which, among other things, will provide comped entrance to its live events and a benefit card

While there’s always been opportunity for startups that serve niche audiences, their businesses have to offer a value proposition, or a unique advantage, that serves that niche better than the mainstream option (or network or app). And thus, Klein says that the goal with dot429 has been to create something more sophisticated than what’s already out there, as in bringing the next generation of social networking to the LGBT community.

Beyond connecting online and offline networking, Klein says that the startup will introduce a mentoring section later this year to match mentors with mentees, along with an online collaboration tool. The startup is also undergoing a major editorial redesign (the site has both video and eMagazine components), and has brought on “an editor from a pulitzer prize winning paper who has written for the New York Times and New York Observer” to lead the editorial department.

dot429 is hoping that by combining content with networking connections, it can fill a void in the marketplace at the right time, while leveraging technology to deliver its content and services more efficiently and effectively — to a community that is increasingly active online, on blogs, and social networks. Klein is also quick to point out that dot429 is not exclusive to the LGBT community, as it has a number of “straight allies” (over 10 percent), who have joined the group to show their support for equality.

Fabulis, once a social networking site for gay men, pivoted into Fab.com and began focusing on online flash sales of design items, showing that gay men weren’t necessarily overly enthusiastic about having their own social network — they were content to use Facebook and already-existant options. Kleing believes that having a separate forum for this type of community-specific networking is important and in high demand, however.

Bringing this networking online (and eventually to mobile) has the potential to be even more powerful, and dot429′s growth seems to be corroborating this.

For more, check out dot429 at home here.

LinkedIn is planning to shut down its Tweets application as of January 31, 2012. As you may remember, the Tweets application allowed users find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter, view Twitter feeds of connections, recommend Twitter users to follow, and more.

In an announcement, LinkedIn says that the application will be removed from all profiles and the homepage. From the announcement: At LinkedIn, we want to provide a simple and efficient experience for members like you. So from time to time, we take a look at our set of features to evaluate how they’re being used by our members. Part of this process sometimes means we decide to eliminate a feature, so we can better invest those resources in building more great LinkedIn products.

Those products include LinkedIn Signal and news aggregator LinkedIn Today.

It sounds like the application wasn’t being used frequently by members (LinkedIn has since taken the Tweet the down, but we have a screengrab below). But from the statement made in the announcement embedded above, that’s probably the likely reason for the widget’s demise. LinkedIn clarified to us that indeed users are still using Twitter from LinkedIn, however, through the built in integrations that are separate from the widget. In essence, the widget became redundant because Twitter is now so baked into the main LinkedIn experience.

The full-fledged version of the Tweets Application was only launched in 2010. With Tweets, you could display your most recent tweets on your LinkedIn profile, access to the updates of people you are following on Twitter, and Tweet, reply, and re-tweet from your LinkedIn home page.

LinkedIn says that it’s not eliminating the Twitter integration completely as your Twitter handle will still be shown on your profile, and if you have integrated your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, Tweets with the hashtag ‘#in’ will still display these Tweets on your profile. And you’ll still be able to Tweet from LinkedIn directly, and post from Twitter to LinkedIn (with the hashtag ‘#in’). But the widget, which acted as more of a feature-rich client, will be laid to rest.

You have a long flight coming up. You don’t want to get stuck sitting next to (fill in the blank here). What if you could use your social networks to select your seatmate, based on your friends or common interests? Would that make for a better flying experience?

Such a service is going to be launched next year. The developer is not some bootstrapped startup. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, founded in 1919 and now part of Air France KLM, confirms to TechCrunch the feature will launch next year.

KLM says their new social seating tool, called “meet & seat”, will work with Facebook and Linkedin, but not Twitter. The tool will be opt-in only. When pressed if both people will be required to accept a seat pairing, KLM couldn’t say because they are still in the development phase.

The travel website Tnooz, which first reported the story, wondered if “this is something passengers really want as opposed to a service the airline believes they might want.” USA Today wrote about the possibilities this could create for in-flight dating, suggesting it “could be fodder for a flight from hell.”

KLM has pushed the envelope on technology before. TechCrunch reported two years ago about the airline’s idea to hand out e-book readers to passengers. Matt Burns called it a bad idea.

KLM isn’t the only one mixing seat selection with social networks. Earlier this year, Malaysia Airlines launched a system that allows passengers to book a flight and check-in all on the airline’s Facebook page. Passengers can also see if any Facebook friends are on their flight.

Startups are also in this space. Planely, wants you to join what they say is the “social flying revolution.” If you give the website info on your flight, they will connect you with other Planely fliers.

Another website, AirTroductions joined the deadpool. The founder says he sold it in 2006 and it appears the new owners closed it. The website hasn’t been updated in 5 years.

If flying KLM, would you sign up for this?

Is there any part of human existence that won’t have a social media component?

[Image: Dmitriy Shironosov/Shutterstock]

Earlier this year, LinkedIn acquired CardMunch, an iPhone app that lets you take a snapshot of a business card and have it added to your iPhone contacts. Today, LinkedIn is relaunching the CardMunch iPhone app with a brand new mobile experience for the professionals on the social network.

For background, CardMunch uses Mechanical Turk to convert business cards into phone contacts. In fact, millions of business cards have been digitized on CardMunch to date.

With the new version of the app, LinkedIn has combined its wealth of data and overhauled the entire experience to present users with more value. Besides a sleeker interface, LinkedIn has redesigned the camera experience within the app to allow users to take photos of cards easily. There are three simple screens to choose from on the app—card capture, contact list, and contact details and LinkedIn profiles.

Past versions of the app only showed you the information taken from the business card you scanned but with this version Linkedin has integrated profile data with cards. Once the apps scans a card, CardMunch will map that information with the contact’s LinkedIn profile, along with photos of contacts, common connections, past work experience, education.

You can still add contacts to your iPhone address book, connect with contacts on
LinkedIn, view your mobile rolodex of cards, and more. You can also add notes to cards and contacts within the app.

While CardMunch used to be a paid app, the iOS app is now free for users.

LinkedIn has been steadily boosting its mobile offerings, and mobile page views have grown 400% year-over-year. And the company just launched new iPhone, Android and mobile (HTML5) web apps.

With an enormous professional social network consisting of over 100 million users, LinkedIn is undoubtedly a great business — and a valuable service. Of course, the problem with LinkedIn and other professional networking and job platforms is that there’s a lack of real conversation between individuals and businesses. Hands down, businesses are looking to hire great talent, but they want more robust ways to find the most relative candidates for their open positions and job seekers want better tools to find the top ranked companies that are relevant to their backgrounds, what those companies are looking for in candidates — and they want feedback.

In September, two Stanford Business School, grads Brendan Wallace and Adeyemi Ajao, launched the beta build of Identified, a professional job search engine built on Facebook data that looks to take on LinkedIn and BranchOut (among others) in an effort to give job seekers and companies a better way to connect and find talent. The main feature of Identified is its so-called “Identified Score”, which assign a numerical rank (out of 100) to professionals based on their work history, education history and social network.

Wallace and Ajao call these rankings “Google Page Rank for people”; just as the search giant ranks websites based on their relevance to certain search terms, Identified uses its scores to do just that with professionals. The ranking is a proxy for relevance, so based on a user’s most up-to-date background information, they will show up in searches for categories that are relevant to their most recent jobs, etc.

Working with metadata from Facebook, Identified has already created listings for more than 50 million people, although only 150K of those people are active monthly users. But that’s just in six weeks since the launch of its beta. Already, tens of thousands of people are accessing Identified Scores each day to evaluate professionals for recruiting, sales, networking, background checks, and more. What’s more, over 1.8 million scores have been viewed to date, and Wallace says that thousands of companies have already requested access to these scores to pre-screen candidates for recruiting.

But the real value here, Wallace said, is that the average age of the Identified user is 24, and over 90 percent of its users are under the age of 30. With companies vying, categorically, to hire the best young talent, Identified offers businesses an easy, score-based (and relevance-based search) method of finding that talent.

Today, Identified is officially launching out of its public beta, and will now be offering free and open access (for both companies and the public) to the scores of those 50 million-odd professionals. This means that all Identified Scores are now public and will be searchable and accessible to anyone on the Web (and will pop up in Google searches) — companies included. Privacy settings will be included, thankfully.

And to that point, Identified also offers scores for over 60,000 companies and more than 8,000 universities, and Wallace said that many of the early signups the company has seen have come from employees wanting to add more relevant information to the listings of their company or university to up their scores. It’s this kind of gamification that can be a huge legup for Identified.

As Identified Scores go up based on interest from other users or companies (by way of number of views, clicks, and actual hires), the more one adds to their profile, the higher the likelihood becomes that their score will go up, presumably based on their being placed higher in search rankings. Wallace believes that this “the more you add, the higher you’re ranked”, gamified approach presents a higher degree of opportunity for engagement among users, as interaction with their rankings have real world, and career implications.

Of course, having made their scores public so that anyone can now view the scores of 50 million people, there’s some potential here for controversy, but Identified has built in controls so that non-Identified users can only view those profiles of companies and individuals that are registered users.

Yet, the other question for Identified’s ranking system is: What if you didn’t go to an Ivy League school, but you’re still an awesome engineer, for example? Since the point of building its platform on top of Facebook data is to allow people to create networks around the friends and associates they actually interact with (and count as “Friends” on Facebook), if a user shows impressive career history and strong connections/relationships to top engineers, then not having gone to a “top school” becomes less relevant.

Of course, Identified Scores are not meant to be reflective of a person’s “actual worth” — just because you have a “65″ and your friend has an “80″, doesn’t necessarily mean that your friend is a better person, is smarter, etc. In a sense, the company’s scores are like stock prices, in that they don’t necessarily reflect one’s true inherent value, they are based on relevant criteria — in this case to search terms. The scores aren’t perfect.

Even so, Identified adds a level of transparency to the labor market and opens a channel of communication between companies and professionals that has been incomplete to date. Being able to see how “in demand” you are based on your professional history, which companies are looking for employees like you, and how, in turn, you can make yourself more attractive to employers — is a valuable step forward for the professional networking space.

It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a step in the right direction. Whether or not Identified becomes a potential target for acquisition by LinkedIn or just a flat out competitor remains to be seen. But, according to Wallace, they’ve seen that some recognizable names at LinkedIn have been checking out the site.

And investors are certainly interested, as the startup has already raised $5.5 million from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Bill and Tim Draper, former Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya, Farmville Founder Zao Yang, among others.

For more on Identified, check ‘em out here, or see Robin’s initial coverage here.

You could previously connect with contacts from college and grad school on LinkedIn by searching by name or by the educational institution, but LinkedIn is now making this process a much easier, feature rich experience. LinkedIn is debuting a new tool today, called Classmates, which gives the professional social network’s users new insights and networking features to connect with fellow alumni of colleges and universities.

Via Classmates you can choose a network by university (i.e. Columbia University, which is my alma mater), and I can see via graphs where most of my classmates work, what they do (by industry), and where they live. You can also see a list of alumni with whom you share connections, and send them messages from the feature.

For now, the schools you listed on your LinkedIn profile are automatically available. LinkedIn also will set the dates to show people who were on campus during the years you attended school (from your profile). If you have more than one school listed, select a different school from the drop-down window to take a deep data dive on this institution.

The tool actually makes connecting with old alumni much easier. I can imagine this is a pretty popular way that members are using LinkedIn and it makes sense to make this search are more data-rich and useful feature. This is just another example of how LinkedIn is using the massive amounts of data from its 120-million plus members to make the job search and professional connections experience a little bit better.

Though you have to wonder what Classmates.com thinks about the new feature.

U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron recently joined social networking sites LinkedIn and Foursquare in an effort to expand his digital presence and better connect with both citizens and businesses alike. On LinkedIn, Cameron will network with “people and businesses the PM meets regarding U.K. business, enterprise and manufacturing,” according to the official blog post from the PM’s office.

Meanwhile, on Foursquare, the PM will check-in to various venues in order to “illustrate the events the Prime Minister participates in during his day-to-day duties beyond Downing Street.”

Cameron, who has been in the news lately due to his creation of a new “porn filter” for U.K. Internet Service Providers, is already active on social networks including Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and even newcomer Google+. Adding Foursquare and LinkedIn to the list highlights the increasing importance those services have in today’s digital landscape.

That said, the LinkedIn effort is a bit odd since most people use the service for as a place to maintain their online resume and look for job opportunities through their business connections. It’s not typically thought of as a communications platform for politicians. However, it should be interesting to see what happens as a result of the PM’s joining. Will other politicians think to do the same? Or will they stick to more social sites like Facebook and Twitter?

At any rate, seeing a LinkedIn profile for someone of Cameron’s caliber does take a step towards humanizing the man, who, like many other high-caliber politicians, is often thought of as more of an abstract figure than an actual person. It’s refreshing to read his resume that begins simply “I became Prime Minister after the General Election in May 2010,” as if he’s just some other guy talking about what he does for a living. (It’s also pretty fun when you find out that you’re a 3rd degree connection with him!)

The PM’s Foursquare account provides a somewhat voyeuristic look at what a politician does, by tracking who Cameron is meeting with, when and why. Over the past few weeks, before the official announcement was posted, the PM was already checking in to venues including New York, Ontario, the House of Commons and more. It would be more helpful, however, if the PM would consistently check into actual venues, instead of city-sized venues like “Ottawa.” (That’s not how you’re supposed to do it, sir.)

In addition, the Foursquare account provides “tips” to its followers (which appear upon their check-in to particular venues like 10 Downing St.) that provide bits of trivia or history about the venue, such as historical facts, ghost stories and links to related resources on the Web. For example, did you know No. 10 has a resident cat called Larry in charge of pest control? Thanks to Foursquare, I do now. Oh, and in case you’re interested, you can see Flickr photos of Larry hanging around the cabinet here on Flickr, too.

Professional social network LinkedIn is on a bit of an acquisition spree. In its second purchase in two weeks, LinkedIn has acquired hosted search startup IndexTank. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

IndexTank is a real-time, hosted search engine service that allows developers to quickly build search-based applications without having to worry about hosting their own search software. IndexTank’s features include: real-time feed indexing, instantaneous availability of search data, geo search, automatic faceting, range search and instant insights about indexed data from search.

The startup, which has raises $1.6 million in funding, counts Reddit as a customer. Details are still unclear, but it appears that IndexTank’s search technology will be integrated into LinkedIn’s search. IndexTank says that LinkedIn has agreed to maintain the IndexTank service running for the next six months, and will open source key components of the technology.

Last week LinkedIn bought personal relationship manager Connected.

Coming off a weekend of Silicon Valley fundraising, President Barack Obama is visiting LinkedIn this morning, in order to talk about jobs, economy, entrepreneurship and the state of employment in the United States in general. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner introduced the president, who began his talk bringing up the recently announced American Jobs Act, which proposes various reforms for small businesses among other things.

You can watch the townhall live above or follow it on Twitter at #meetopportunity and #intownhall.

U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a stop with professional social network LinkedIn, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today to chat about job creation and the economy from LinkedIn members. The meeting will feature questions from a live audience, as well as questions from thousands contributed by LinkedIn members over the past week. For the past year or so, LinkedIn has taken a number of deep data dives on the profile information of its 120 million members to highlight trends. Today, the network has developed an infographic that examines the economic opportunity and growth in industries from LinkedIn’s members over the past two years.

For example, LinkedIn says that there have been 7.4 million job changes or starts of its members since 2009. The top industries for these changes are higher education, healthcare, information technology, and marketing and advertising.

And 4.7 million LinkedIn members are employed by small businesses. The top growth industries for small businesses on the network are renewables and environment (up 29 percent since 2009); oil and energy (up 20 percent since 2009), food and beverages (up 18 percent since 2009), and healthcare (up 18 percent since 2009).

There are over 360,000 veterans on LinkedIn, and the most popular industries in which veterans work are information technology, defense and space, healthcare, higher education and government administration. Nearly 740,000 members on LinkedIn attended community college, and most studied business, computer science accounting and nursing.

As part of the event with President Obama, LinkedIn will be making a donation of up to 100,000 free subscriptions to Startup America Partnership entrepreneurs (a value of $5 million).

Past data dives compared men and women networkers, professional names, and startup founder profile information.

Is LinkedIn ripe for disruption? There have been various attempts in the past, and now New York-based Workfeeds, launched today, is throwing its hat into the ring – and they have a good chance of making LinkedIn at least nervous. (Unlike Branchout or Identified, Workfeeds doesn’t piggyback on Facebook profiles or log-ins, but is a full-fledged, standalone service.)

Workfeeds’ hypothesis is simple. LinkedIn may be the world’s biggest business social network and obviously offers value to people, but users aren’t really into the experience: recruiters (not members) are the key constituency of the site, the UI has become too cluttered over time, and – most importantly – LinkedIn is just a vast collection of user resumes, and not really social or networking-oriented.

Workfeeds, on the other hand, tries to be “like LinkedIn if it launched now” (and not in 2003). Resumes only play a secondary role.

Instead, the idea is to focus more on social and networking aspects than LinkedIn does by allowing users to join vertical networks on the site, each with feeds that offer specific content that’s actually relevant to members of the same professional circle.

Workfeeds doesn’t want to be a one-size-fits-all network like LinkedIn but eventually develop into an ecosystem consisting of “thousands” of highly specific networks that are based on how professionals actually affiliate, for example by similar industries or job functions.

Software engineers can interact within their own vertical network, media professionals can set up a separate feed, while venture capitalists or tech CEOs may choose to set their network to “invitation only”: you get the idea. What’s interesting here is that similar to Ning, users can suggest and create vertical networks by themselves, too, eventually leading to a site structure and value proposition that would be totally different from that of LinkedIn.

A vertical network specifically set up for “Hedge Fund Investment Professionals” is the only one that’s currently live (Workfeeds co-founder Kir Kahlon tells me other networks will follow in the next few days).

Here’s how your home page looks like after logging in:

Another difference to LinkedIn: within each network, Workfeeds puts “structured” feeds (and not resumes or single feeds) front and center. Users can choose between 20 different categories when they post to feeds, for example “I’m working on”, “Asking a question”, or “Need an expert”.

Different types of posts:

Example of a job posting:

In other words, users can find everything important on Workfeeds in a network’s structured feed: Twitter-like status updates (but professional only), new job opportunities, recommendations, events, Q&A, link sharing, etc. Needless to say, it’s possible to join and then track/filter multiple networks and feeds (like in a centralized “social inbox” that pulls all the content in real-time).

In the feeds, individual curators are supposed to control the quality of the content and keep spam to a minimum (a big problem in quite a few LinkedIn groups currently), with Workfeeds making active members who contribute high-quality posts stand out of the crowd through votes and other social measures.

There are too many other differences to LinkedIn (a followers/following system for people wanting to connect, a much cleaner user interface, etc.) to list up in this post, so I suggest you simply give Workfeeds a try to see for yourself.

Workfeeds spent two years developing various LinkedIn alternatives before they arrived at the current version: let us know in the comments how far you think it can come in challenging LinkedIn or becoming a “Facebook for work”.

Web and mobile payments platform Dwolla announced today that it now includes integration with LinkedIn’s API, allowing users to send and receive payments to their connections on LinkedIn’s social network. Previously, Dwolla had integrated with Facebook and Twitter to offer similar functionality. And just last week, Dwolla added Foursquare support, too, allowing Dwolla users to passively check-in to a location when making a purchase.

Dwolla, for those unaware, is a company attempting to disrupt how payment networks operate by creating a network that’s devoid of personal information. With the service, users can send and receive funds to and from other Dwolla users as well as with a select group of supported merchants. But most importantly, Dwolla’s distinction from other players in the payments space is its focus on cash, an under-represented market in electronic payments. Users fund Dwolla accounts with cash from their own bank account, and can then use the company’s Web-based platform or their mobile phone to perform the payments at rates that are often far less than on PayPal.

The company has been busy adding new features over the past several months, rolling out FiSync integration for banks to eliminate ACH wait times, “Proxi” for proximity-based mobile payments, the aforementioned Foursquare integration, updates to its Android app and more.

The new LinkedIn support is available now and can be enabled online in the settings. Dwolla is also ending the beta period for Proxi, and is rolling it out to all iOS users today as well. The update will be available in the iTunes App Store.

With these additions, there are now 7 ways to send money via Dwolla: Dwolla ID, Facebook, Twitter, email, SMS, Proxi and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has taken a number of deep data dives on the profile information of its 120 million members to highlight trends. The company has compared men and women networkers, professional names and more. Today, the company has focused on examining the profiles of entrepreneurs, and sifted through its millions of public profiles, to analyze tens of thousands startup founder profiles on the site.

Here’s how LinkedIn evaluated and separated the data. Linkedin considered professionals as Startup Founders if they identified themselves as founders (or co- founders) of U.S. companies created after 2000, with a LinkedIn company profile, and that currently have between 2 – 200 employees. LinkedIn excluded small law, consulting and real
estate firms, as well as LLCs (the pool ended up with over 13,000 entrepreneurs). LinkedIn then compared founders them with the average LinkedIn member and highlighted characteristics that disproportionately appear among startup founders.

As you can see from the infographic, the data shows that the most represented business schools amongst founders are Stanford, Harvard and MIT Sloan taking the top spots. In particular, the most popular subjects entrepreneurs chose to study in college were technical majors (except civil engineering), with nursing and administration as the least popular areas of study.

According to LinkedIn, founders of semiconductor and pharmaceutical startups usually have previous industry experience, while founders of retail, consumer goods, leisure & travel and professional training companies don’t. Most the founders who had academia in their work history founded startups in the nanotech, biotech and medical device industries.

In terms of the distribution of founders’ age at their first startup, LinkedIn’s data shows that 65% of entrepreneurs are 30 and older and only 2% are serial entrepreneurs. The top regions where startup founders are based are New York, California, Utah and Colorado.

The companies that are most likely to appear on founders’ profiles aren’t too surprising and include Adobe, Apple, eBay (including PayPal), Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, SGI and
Yahoo. In terms of LinkedIn network connections, founders are also disproportionately connected to venture capitalists, bloggers and recruiters.

comScore’s July traffic numbers are out and similar to June’s findings, Facebook and Twitter both saw record traffic in terms of U.S. unique visitors in the month. In July, Facebook saw a whopping 162 million unique visitors, compared to 160.8 million unique vistors in June, and 157.2 million uniques in May.

Twitter also posted record traffic in its five year history; with 32.8 million unique U.S. visitors in July, up from 30.6 million unique visitors in June, and 27 million unique vistors in May. As we’ve noted in the past, the steady increase in traffic is a big deal for Twitter, which splits traffic between its own mobile clients and the many third-party clients that are used to access the network. And Twitter just completed the switch from the old web interface to its redesigned, feature-rich web app.

LinkedIn, which saw a traffic spike post-IPO, dipped slightly in terms of unique U.S. visitors in July, seeing 32.5 million unique visitors in the month compared to 33.9 million unique visitors in June. MySpace continued to bleed traffic, with 32.8 million unique visitors in July (tied with Twitter), down from 33 million in June.

While we once thought that Facebook and Twitter would duel it out for users and traffic, clearly that’s not the case anymore. Facebook’s U.S. traffic is five-fold to Twitter visitors. Twitter isn’t ‘killing’ Facebook, or vice versa, as Twitter is still growing in terms of traffic.

But with the new kid on the block, Google+ steadily gaining users, it should be interesting to see if the search giant’s social network will reach Twitter’s traffic. Already there are signs that Google+ traffic is slowing, but it’s still early and that could change.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner explained on the company’s first earnings call a few weeks ago that the company is planning to make a big investment in its mobile strategy. Today, the professional social network is bringing a significant update to its mobile apps, including a new iPhone, Android and mobile web apps.

LinkedIn Mobile is growing 400% year-over-year in terms of users, and LinkedIn says that because of this engagement, the company’s mobile apps needed to be tweaked to reflect a better user experience. The network has re-organized its iPhone and Android applications around 4 areas—Updates, Inbox, your profile, and groups. You could search for and access updates, your inbox, profile and connections from the previous versions of the iPhone and Android app, but the ability to browser and interact with your groups and add connections through LinkedIn’s ‘people you may know’ feature is new.

So in the apps, which have a much cleaner and simpler interface, you’ll see four main options. You can view updates from your network and top news from social aggregator LinkedIn Today; view your invitations and messages, access your profile, connections, and share updates; and browse and interact with your groups, as well as build your network through the People You May Know feature.

LinkedIn said that the Update stream is the most used area of its mobile apps, so this feature has become more prominent within the apps. And Groups was one of the most requested feature in the mobile app experience, and users can now access the list of groups they are members of, browse discussions, and start new discussions or commenting on existing ones.

Across the board, LinkedIn says the new mobile apps are between two and ten times faster across all features, including search and the update stream. And LinkedIn, like many other companies, is betting on HTML5 with its new mobile website, which includes much of the same functionality as the native apps.

With north of a 120 million members, LinkedIn is no doubt growing pretty fast post-IPO. And with this engagement and the launch of news aggregator LinkedIn Today, the network’s mobile apps need to meet with this demand.

A few weeks ago I was meeting with Peter Thiel and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t some Netscape moment that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite.

LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an insanely high P/E if you’re a 10-year-old, profitable company, growing revenues at more than 100% a year that can command a $5 billion-plus valuation. That, he argued, is what the market wants right now, and those companies are in short supply.

More to the point, those kinds of IPOs couldn’t be farther from the historical Silicon Valley playbook. Most of the great tech companies went public at valuations well under $1 billion, and had their biggest innovations after they’d priced. LinkedIn’s IPO isn’t a harbinger of the good ol’ days. Rather, it showed how dramatically different the relationship between Wall Street and the Valley has become since the last good ol’ days.

In our final segment with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner I asked him his view on what his company just did for Silicon Valley: Open the markets or close them for all but the big five or so private giants? We also talk about that valuation. He wouldn’t answer whether the company was actually worth $10 billion, but he did share his thoughts on using that — let’s just say generous– price-to-earnings ratio as a currency for more acquisitions.

I began by asking what he learned from his time as a senior executive for Yahoo– decidedly not the Valley darling for some time– that prepared him for his new Wall Street duties as CEO of LinkedIn. (For the first segment on LinkedIn’s earnings go here; for the second segment on its user growth and Weiner’s experience in the IPO media firestorm go here.)

I asked Weiner what that week was like for LinkedIn, a company that’s usually the boring social media giant with no pedophile scandals, privacy uproars or stories of meth pipes and abandoned cats. He insists the team wasn’t distracted amid the media frenzy….yeah, I have a hard time buying that too. But he points out that the added pride associated with working at a company worth upwards of $9 billion increased the intensity to execute. I wouldn’t be surprised if all that talk of the company being overvalued lit a spark in the company too.

Weiner and I also talk about LinkedIn’s stunning user growth this quarter, whether companies should reexamine that late 1990s idea of IPOs as marketing events, and whether that user pop is sustainable.

LinkedIn posted its first earnings as a public company yesterday and in true form as a social network, the company used a number of social media outlets to disseminate this information. LinkedIn posted earnings slides on a SlideShare Pro Channel at the close of the bell yesterday, which made it much easier for bloggers and others to then embed and share these slides on their sites (we did).

LinkedIn also partnered with StockTwits for the live-tweeting of the company’s earnings. StockTwits’ LinkedIn ticker page includes this stream of information as well as the earnings presentation.

As more and more people turn to social media sites for their news, more companies are using social media tools during their earnings calls. As StockTwits’ Chris Bullock writes, Companies are actively posting 10-20 messages during their earnings call that highlight the key points – almost like a “Cliff Notes” for earnings.

As you can see from LinkedIn’s Tweet stream, the company’s chief blogger Mario Sundar Tweeted everything from CEO Jeff Weiner’s commentary to revenue numbers to traffic updates. LinkedIn isn’t the only tech company to live Tweet their earnings. eBay also live Tweets via its eBay Ink blog.

And using SlideShare for earnings presentations and annual reports makes it easier for investors and consumers to distribute this information and publicly comment. Of course, you can always go to the investor relations sites for the companies to access earnings slides, but I find most of these sites clunky and difficult to navigate. Dell also shares its earnings presentations via SlideShare.

As Bullock notes, companies have to deal with certain compliance issues when it comes to sharing financial information but I think we are going to see more and more public companies, especially those who are playing in the tech field, use social media when reporting earnings. I for one, can’t wait to see how Facebook uses Twitter, and its own site, when the company eventually goes public next year.

Thankfully for LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, the company made its debut on the quarterly conference call with surprisingly good earnings– particularly profits no one was expecting and significant jumps in user growth. (Wall Street, only impressed for a few hours, has been trading the stock down this morning; still LinkedIn has held up decently compared to others.)

We spent some time with Weiner at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View yesterday to talk about a lot of things: The quarter, that valuation, whether LinkedIn has opened the market or proven you have to be a $5 billion-$10 billion whopper of a company to get out and sustain a good price, and the debate over whether people still want everything relating to their professional life siloed on one social network, or mixed in to Facebook and Twitter. We’ll be posting chunks of the interview throughout the day.

Up first: What happened this quarter that Wall Street wasn’t counting on, the surprising strength of its hiring services business given the brutal national unemployment, whether LinkedIn is too reliant on that business and how its international expansion strategy is 180 degrees different than Groupon’s.