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FriendFeed has garnered a lot of popularity within the tech community for its ability to aggregate information across a wide range of social networks, and layer a new conversation on top of that. Minggl is a new service attempting to do something similar, only via the browser rather than a web page.

I sat down with Minggl founder Dewey Gaedcke and marketing director Brian Buser to go over the service and have them show me what it was all about.

Minggl exists as a browser plug-in for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Thanks to this, it’s always running (as long as you want it to be) while your browser is open. Say you want to track what your contacts are doing. To do this on FriendFeed you would have to have window with the site open and switch back to check it constantly. With Minggl you simply browse the web as you normally would as notifications appear on your toolbar as your contacts update various services

But Minggl does a lot more than this. It also allows you to merge your friends together from different online networks and tag those friends so you can easily search for and find just who you are looking for. Say you have a group of friends you go hiking with. Simply tag anyone with “hiking” from across any network you have set up on Minggl, and they will show up in your sidebar upon a search.

The service also has a “status blaster” which allows you to update your status across all the sites that use such functionality, like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. You can also do group messaging on networks from within Minggl. That feature is interesting because it points to one of the bigger differences that separates Minggl from other services, including FriendFeed.

Where FriendFeed uses sites’ APIs to pull in information from other networks, Minggl actually logs you in to the services in the background to pull information. Because of this, Gaedcke explains, Minggl has access to MySpace and LinkedIn and also the data on Facebook, such as the News Feed, that they won’t send out via API. You are constantly logged in to these sites, but you can still set the interval with which Minggl checks for updates.

Getting the information from these social networks was crucial for Minggl because it is “more friend-centric than news-centric,” Gaedcke notes.

Right now Minngl works with the Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twtter. The service also just launched integration with the popular social news voting site Digg to pull in the stories users submit and vote on.

The service doesn’t plan on stopping with those. Gaedcke and Buser said that it’s relatively easy to add more services to the toolbar, so we should expect the likes of YouTube, Flickr, Yelp and others soon. Also in the pipeline are some very cool and interesting features that they are hesitant to share at this time, but they gave me a sneak peak, and I can certainly vouch for them being potentially controversial — and popular, if executed right.

Minggl does have limited advertisements in the activity stream sidebar right now, but it is more focused on building up a loyal user base than monetizing right now

Another competitor for Minggl would have to be the social network-infused browser Flock. Flock might do things a little prettier, but it also requires that you download and use an entirely new browser. With Minggl, you can stick with either Firefox or Internet Explorer. Then there are newer services like MySocial 24×7 which takes FriendFeed’s services and ports them into your browser.

Over the weekend, we heard that LinkedIn has big news in store, that was likely not an acquisition by the most prominent interested buyer, News Corp. After we published the story on Sunday evening, we heard from two sources that LinkedIn was instead working on raising a new funding round — this is a company that also claims to be making $100 million in revenue this year. More on that in a moment.

Additional details have since emerged: Techcrunch confirmed the funding angle yesterday afternoon, reporting that bank Allen & Co. was trying to help the Mountain View, Calif. company raise a round that would value it at $1 billion. Today, Silicon Alley Insider confirms that angle again, reporting that the round is nearly closed.

So what would LinkedIn need a new round to actually fund, since it’s purportedly already bringing in the cash? Well, the latest I’m hearing is that LinkedIn is looking at going after new areas, outside of the business social networking base that it’s known for. What does that mean? Maybe it’s going to try to be a more general social network? I doubt that — it already is facing competition from Facebook for business networking, and becoming more like Facebook would just make LinkedIn less differentiated. Instead, my guess is that LinkedIn is looking hard at how to compete in so-called enteprise social software, in some sense competing against the many startups that somehow try to integrate blogs, wikis, social networks, messaging features and other social tools into a company’s internal software systems.

LinkedIn already has large portions of a given company using it, why not leverage that user base to start selling (or giving away) tools that build on the LinkedIn service? Of course, it’s not just startups that LinkedIn would be competing against here.

It could be thinking about competing against so-called Software as a Service companies like Salesforce. Take a quick look at what LinkedIn has been focusing on in recent months. A developer platform (albeit an unlaunched one that one of our sources went so far as to call “vaporware”), an expert research network to help researchers in a company find quality independent analysis, and company profile pages that brings together information about a company and people in it.

It’s pretty easy to imagine LinkedIn introducing a calendar system, project management software, or any number of simple enterprise software features — integrated with business relationship data that no other company has access to. For a nice little example of LinkedIn thinking about such software, take a look at this screenshot (above) of this conference scheduling application, created as a demo by the company around the time that it launched its developer platform last fall. I’ve heard from Facebook employees that in past years it has been approached by large corporations looking for it to create them entire intranets. This is one area where LinkedIn has clear potential to one-up Facebook.

Updated three times: After I published the initial version of the story last night, two sources have told us they’ve heard that LinkedIn has raised or is raising a new round of funding. Techcrunch now says it has been hearing similarly. More details below.

Something’s up at business social network LinkedIn. The Mountain View, Calif. company’s board meeting last week went way over its scheduled time, and sources tell us there’s some “good” news coming. The details are still hazy [but getting less so], and worth noting because of the ongoing rumors swirling about the company’s long-term plans.

Last fall, reliable sources said that News Corp was negotiating to buy LinkedIn. The purpose of that acquisition, we heard then, would have been to integrate LinkedIn’s network with News Corp. newspapers like the Wall Street Journal. Hopefully, this would help New Corp to revive its declining print-media ad revenue through online initiatives.

However, we’re told that deal was dead of last week, because of News Corp.’s purchase of Newsday. Its stockholders would likely look down on yet another purchase. It’s possible, however, that that the deal has been resurrected.

Here’s why LinkedIn may be considered valuable to a suitor. Its user base doubled last year to more than 20 million active users worldwide, and it claims that 1.3 million new members are joining per month. The average user is 41 years old and makes around $110,000 — which the company says allows it to charge advertisers $75 per thousand impressions (which is exceptionally high).

In recent months, the company has rolled out a developer platform for integration with third-party applications and web sites, an expert research network, company profile pages, and other features that may help it make more money. It is already projecting total revenue of between $75 million and $100 million this year.

This past January, cofounder and board chairman Reid Hoffman (pictured) told the Sydney Morning Herald that the company will most likely file for an IPO before 2010 if “he isn’t first tempted to sell to one of the suitors that have inquired about buying LinkedIn. Hoffman wouldn’t identify the suitors.”

LinkedIn representatives have either declined to comment or not responded after we contacted them yesterday.

Update: A new source has heard that the company is raising more money, which would imply that it is burning through the aforementioned revenue without making substantial profit. LinkedIn has previously raised $27.5 million from venture firms Sequoia Capital, Greylock and Bessemer Venture Partners. Also, the company’s developer platform has yet to publicly launch, as Dave McClure and others were quick to point out.

Update Two: Another new, well-placed source says they’ve heard that the company has raised a new round. Considering the company’s size, revenue and market position, my guess is that a private equity firm has stepped in with many tens of millions of dollars — just as PE firms have recently done for ad network Federated Media, IM aggregator Meebo, widget maker Slide, DIY social network creator Ning and other web companies. The general rationale behind these companies’ decisions to raise funding is that they’re neither large nor profitable enough to justify an IPO, yet too large and ambitious to sell. With the current economic problems, large chunks of late-stage funding will allow these companies to grow and figure out their business models until IPO and M&A markets improve.

Update Three: Techcrunch hears that investment bank Allen & Co. is helping LinkedIn to raise a venture round that would value the company at $1 billion.

And a bonus update: David Cowan, a managing partner at Bessemer, who sits on LinkedIn’s board, said no comment because it was a private board matter.

Matt Marshall contributed to this article.

[Photo via USA Today]

LinkedIn wants to be the center of business networking and data, but can it do everything, or will competing startups carve out their own niches? Latest example: LinkedIn is introducing new pages (LinkedIn’s own, left) that detail information about companies, partially by aggregating information about its users. Meanwhile, for the fund-raising focused, there’s a new sort of investment social network created by San Francisco-based Venture Hacks.

Venture Hacks, formerly a blog comprised of veteran entrepreneurs and investors, that offers advice to startups, takes a proactive stance in connecting its audience. It offers a social network where people can “subscribe” to each other, somewhat like friending somebody on a social network or following them on messaging service Twitter, or subscribing to them on a social news aggregator like Friendfeed. Then, you can see who the people you subscribe to are subscribing to. People can also recommend each other. It’s all reminiscent of LinkedIn, but with more streamlined features. Each person can provide a profile with employee history and other information, as well as their email addresses so they can contact each other directly. The idea is that potential investors can watch which one of the people they subscribe to is recommending an entrepreneur — an entrepreneur working at a company that the investor might want to put money into.

Since LinkedIn is already a way for business people to stay in contact, the two companies are in some sense competitors. But LinkedIn is moving in many directions, coming out with a new service — or the promise of a service — every two weeks or so. These company pages, its latest release, is based on using data from LinkedIn as well as information provided by partner companies. It lists the executives of a company, based on what it knows from its own data, along with new hires, total number of employees, worldwide locations of employees, and other information. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off
2. Startup employees headed to big companies?
3. Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one
4. Sprint’s fate unclear
5. Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble
6. Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once

Niche social networks grow, market leaders level off — Web metrics service Compete reports that leading social networks MySpace and Facebook saw traffic plateau in the US between January and February, with smaller sites growing fast. One must be cautious about interpreting monthly numbers — large networks have seen seasonal dips in the past, and obviously no social network can grow forever (our coverage). Regardless, the largest, fast-growing social network is high school social network MyYearbook, which has grown 284 percent since February of last year, to more than 20 million visits this past month.

A host of Silicon Valley companies also have reason to be happy. Business network LinkedIn grew 729 percent to more than 11 million visits. White-label social network provider Ning, which we’ve previously questioned the potential of, is doing well for itself, having grown 4,803 percent to nearly four million visits. Likewise, messaging service Twitter, which generally keeps a tight lid on its internal numbers, grew 4,368 percent to more than four million visits.

But the fastest-growing site of them all is Fubar, an online bar and happy hour — and not a dating site, as its founders made clear to us last year (see comments). It grew to 3,272,217 percent to more than 6.5 million visits last month. Cheers!

Startup employees headed to big companies? — The Wall Street Journal puts together some evidence — and more speculation — that there’s “a new flight to safety [at big companies] among tech-industry workers as the economy struggles.”

Stage6 had a lot of would-be investors, still has at least one — The aftershocks of DivX’s decision to close popular online video site Stage6 are continuing. Today, Greg Sandoval reports that MySpace cofounder-turned-investor Brad Greenspan still has an offer on the table, even though Stage6’s core team has quit and the site has all but shut down. We’ve also spoken with a number of investors who said they would have been interested in funding Stage6 if it was spun out — as was DivX’s original plan. As of today, the site’s front page features a final message about the closure in a rather bizarre-looking format. The site has otherwise been wiped clean, except for a message at the bottom of the homepage (pictured) encouraging Stage6 users to go to Veoh, another online video site.

Sprint’s fate unclear — A host of rumors are circling the company. One is that T-Mobile is looking to buy it. Another is that Nextel will be spun off. More here.

Sandvine, a company that helped Comcast block BitTorrent traffic, facing trouble — Last year, Comcast tried to selectively slow down sites and services that use a lot of bandwidth, in order to prevent peer-to-peer file-sharing. It used network management software provided by Sandvine. Comcast’s actions got it in trouble with the FCC (our coverage). Now, not surprisingly, the market for Sandvine’s software is withering, TorrentFreak reports.

Chatterous: Message all of your friends at once — Chatterous lets you send a single message to friends across SMS, IM and email. Mashable has the details on this Y Combinator-backed company.

Here’s the latest action:
1) Wikileaks judge restores restores site, slaps self on wrist
2) AllPeers’ peer-to-peer scheme fails to capture users
3) Chevron, Weyerhaeuser join up for cellulosic ethanol
4) Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech
5) Akamai wins patent fight, but not happy with ruling
6) Woz points out flaws in Apple’s latest products
7) Global warming, now with double the lethality
8) LinkedIn’s new features look a little more like Facebook
9) Fastcompany.tv launches with Robert Scoble
10) Fortune tops “Most Admired” list with Valley companies

Wikileaks judge restores site, slaps self on wrist — A federal judge who ordered that whistle-blower site Wikileaks be scrubbed from the web not only reversed his own order, but has since released a statement suggesting that he overstepped his bounds and possibly violated the First Amendment, acknowledging that free speech on the Internet is a tricky issue.

AllPeers’ P2P sharing extension fails to capture users, closes — AllPeers, a clever Firefox extension that allowed the peer-to-peer sharing, is dead. The prognosis: Not enough users to satisfy the investors, Mangrove Capital Partners and Index Ventures. There’s a brief obituary at TechCrunch.

Chevron and Weyerhaeuser join forces for cellulosic ethanol — Ain’t green great? Take Chevron and Weyerhaeuser, two giant companies known for environmental damage — the first for oil exploration, the latter for logging and creating Superfund sites — add an impending global crisis, and come up with Catchlight Energy, a new joint venture to research cellulosic ethanol. The company will employ up to 40 researchers, making it one of the larger cellulosic efforts.

Saudi Arabia and IBM partner to develop green nanotech — Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is keeping up with the Joneses by setting up its own nanotech research lab, which will put most of its efforts toward solar energy. The Jones here, in case you missed it, is Abu Dhabi with its $15 billion Masdar City initiative.

Akamai prevails in patent fight, but unhappy with the winnings — Akamai won a patent battle with rival content distribution network Limelight, but the amount — $45 million — was less than half of the $100 million the company thought it deserved, according to Xconomy. Limelight, for its part, would prefer to multiply the amount by 0; it’s appealing the case.

Woz points out the flaws with latest Apple products — Acting as the super-ego to the ego of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak spent some time criticizing the Apple Air and iPhone to the Sydney Morning Herald. (The id, we’ll assume, is represented by Apple fanboys.) The brief version: He thinks that some fairly vital features were unnecessarily left out of the two devices.

Global warming, now with double the lethality — According to a study cited by the New Scientist: “A rise in CO₂ increases the temperature and water vapour content of the atmosphere, which in turn accelerate ozone production and encourage particulates to hang around in the air.” That means more lung damage, and ultimately, more deaths.

LinkedIn’s new features make it more like Facebook — Unfair perhaps, but the business networking site will inevitably be compared to Facebook. Web Worker Daily explains why new LinkedIn features like status updates make it more like its chattier rival.

FastCompany.tv launches entrepreneur-focused web shows — Robert Scoble has the first two shows on the new video portal, Fastcompany.tv.

Fortune ranks “Most Admired” companies, tech firms top list — Apple is number one and Google is number four on Fortune’s new list of the 20 most admired companies, which doubles as a clever way for Fortune to get 20 pageviews from a single article.

LinkedIn, the site for professional contacts, has just launched a new homepage designed to make the site more navigable (the full redesign will roll out tomorrow). The company has been has been privately testing the new design since last December — we previewed many of the changes in detail then.

Suffice to say, it’s about time that LinkedIn got an upgrade. With this new design, the company has made a point of separating out information about you from information about the people you’re connected to. I found the old design a confusing mix of options for looking at different chunks of information from myself.

The main improvements include a way to see the articles that are related to the network that you’re in. So you’ll see news about the college (that you’ve told LinkedIn) you’ve gone to, for example.

There’s also a news feed, called “network updates” about what your LinkedIn connections are doing, that appears to provide more detail than the previous version.

Another significant move is the introduction of widgets — what LinkedIn prefers to call “modules” — some built by LinkedIn, some built by partners. One widget, for example, is a new version of LinkedIn Answers, the company’s service where people can ask and answer questions. In the beta test, the redesign led to double its previous usage.

Note: The company’s developer platform (our coverage), which lets developers build their own applications for LinkedIn, is only open to third parties that LinkedIn selects. It is currently a work in progress.

LinkedIn itself is growing fast. The company says it has grown to 20 million active users monthly, up from 17 million last fall. LinkedIn’s executives assert that they’ve now reached critical mass, where the “network effect” is kicking in. Increasingly, people see it as the place to go to network professionally (find a job, reach out to someone you don’t know through your network, etc), because most other people are also on the network.

This resonates with our own experience. While we were on LinkedIn years ago, most people weren’t, and it wasn’t that useful. These days, it’s surprising how many conversations between regular (non-geek) people you overhear mentioning they used LinkedIn to connect with this person or that person.

While the company was at one point pondering a proposed purchase by News Corp. (our coverage), it has clearly set itself on an ambitious and independent path. It sees its network as coming to dominate businesspeople’s online networking, just like a couple big, more general social networks have dominated for everybody else. Its redesign is just one of many new initiatives. Another we covered is its new research network, which mines its user data to pinpoint experts on niche topics (our coverage).

LinkedIn, the businessperson’s social network, is offering a new way for companies to gather valuable background information when they’re making decisions. It’s mining the data in its own network to identify people who are experts on trends, companies and people related to financial markets, and pairing them with customers.

It’s “a Web 2.0 version of the Gerson-Lehman Group’s expert network,” Tim O’Reilly calls it. GLG puts together networks of experts to provide feedback on any topic, which subscribers pay a large fee for.

LinkedIn tried its own professional network of “experts “last year (our coverage), which didn’t work. Now the company is apparently going to be tapping into the “social graph” of its users, analyzing relationships between people, their companies and professions to figure out who knows a lot about what.

Let’s say you’re looking at making an investment in a company that makes a certain product. You’d want to talk to the products’ buyers, its sellers, the former employees of the company. LinkedIn will be able to put you in touch with all of these people, as Mike Gamson, a general manager at LinkedIn, explains to eWeek.

The service isn’t going live for several months, and doesn’t have an available pricing fee but I, for one, am interested in trying it out for reporting on stories.

Friendster and Bebo are joining LinkedIn as the latest large social networks to throw open their web sites to outside developers.

Like Facebook, and a recent effort led by Google to do something similar with its “OpenSocial” project, these sites are letting third parties build applications for their pages. By recruiting other developers, the social networks are hoping to stimulate a barrage of activity — letting developers access data about users to create helpful services.

This, in turn, is expected to bring new advertising and subscription opportunities back to the networks.

Facebook, and now LinkedIn, Friendster and Bebo have each created a richer set of application programming interfaces (APIs) than offered by OpenSocial. OpenSocial, announced last month, is by many accounts a work in progress.

The value of any of these social networking platforms are open to question. Results have also been mixed for Facebook’s platform,.

Fewer than one hundred Facebook applications are even earning their developers a decent living, from what we’ve heard in the past. The results aren’t due to lack of effort on the part of developers: There are nearly 11,000 Facebook applications today.

Of course, applications designed to entertain, such as iLike’s music fan applications or RockYou’s Superwall, have managed to get millions of Facebook users, with hundreds of thousands using the application each day. Those companies are figuring out how to make money, and claim some success, although they haven’t revealed revenue numbers.

Business-focused application have not been a hit with Facebook users, as far as we know — not even something simple, like a group to-do list. But maybe work-related applications aren’t a good fit with Facebook, which has its roots as a social diversion for college students.

On Monday, business social network LinkedIn began testing that idea. It announced a platform (our coverage) built around its set of data about your business relationships, that other business-focused companies may want to access. Business Week, for example, has already built an application that shows you how you’re connected to people and companies in the publication’s stories. Data-sharing has long been part of LinkedIn’s strategy. Note: You can already pay to put your LinkedIn data in your Plaxo or Salesforce account.

On Tuesday, Friendster introduced more features for its developer platform, which launched late October (our coverage), including a directory of more than 180 third-party applications. Friendster’s platform is also a work in progress. For example, it apparently doesn’t enable voice connections on third party applications, although VoIP companies have had widgets on the site for years.

Today, Bebo will launch its own developer platform, as was mentioned in a couple blogs yesterday. From what our sources tell us, it will be very similar to Facebook’s platform, with a markup language and structure so Facebook developers can easily port their applications to its site. It is designed to integrate with OpenSocial as the latter’s development catches up.

Bebo has developed its own focus: distribution deals with large media companies, and entertainment features aimed at teenagers.

Separately, Bebo has already launched its “Open Media” platform (our coverage), a set of pre-built applications designed to give large media companies an inside track for distributing their copyrighted audio and video wares.

Where does this leave OpenSocial and its long list of partners? Google has put some serious brains on improving it, including Graham Spencer, the chief technology officer of JotSpot before Google bought it. JotSpot itself was designed to be an “application wiki” that allowed users to both select pre-existing JotSpot applications, such as a simple calendar or task-tracker, or build their own on top of it.

There are opportunities for many different types of companies to take advantage of the newly-available relationships between people present in these social network. How much those opportunities are worth is the next question.

Tomorrow, I’ll be moderating a panel on how to turn these apps into businesses, at an open house put on by Social Media in Palo Alto, California (more on its Facebook group, here ).
[With a hat tip to Nick O'Neill.]

updated
LinkedIn has just launched its own developer platform and a new design that promises to make it more useful to its millions of business users.

Earlier this year, many wondered if social network Facebook would overtake LinkedIn as a business network destination. Many professionals have started to use Facebook for networking — enjoying its more social features.

LinkedIn’s new features now put it a step ahead of the competition. You’ll start finding connections to people on LinkedIn while you’re using other web sites, through third-party applications. You’ll see connections with friends from other social networks like Myspace and Hi5 show up in LinkedIn. On your page, you’ll get “modules” for third-party applications (more on that in a sec; they’re like Facebook applications) and a news aggregator, featuring articles about your industry. These are LinkedIn’s efforts to make you spend more time on the site each day.

Business Week, one pre-launch platform partner, has developed a feature that lets you see how you’re connected through LinkedIn to people and companies written about in its articles. Click on a name in a Business Week article, and you’ll see a popup window showing how you’re connected through LinkedIn (see screenshots, left and below).

Business Week also has a LinkedIn feature, where you can send the article to your LinkedIn friends, so your contacts will see it the next time they log in to LinkedIn.

LinkedIn aggregates articles that are uploaded to give you a personalized news section of the LinkedIn site. You can see the most popular articles about your company, your partners and competitors as well as other news from your industry.

The Mountain View, Calif. company has also made sweeping design changes, timed with the platform launch. It has simplified its homepage, borrowing from the “feed” concept already seen on Facebook and more recently sites like contact manager Plaxo. You’ll now get a running list in LinkededIn of your contacts and their activities on the site. LinkedIn’s term for this is “Network Updates,” as opposed to Facebook’s “News Feeds.”

LinkedIn will also let you add what it called “modules,” or developer’s applications that appear in LinkedIn. This component was announced last month as part of the Google-led OpenSocial developer platform. OpenSocial is a still-early effort to let developers build such applications that work on a range of social networks — besides LinkedIn, OpenSocial partners include social networks like Myspace, Hi5 and Bebo, and business software giant Oracle.

You can pick and choose modules, which will appear next to your feed. One example of a module is a calendar that appears in LinkedIn, that features upcoming events in your industry. The application automatically knows what industry you’re in, based on your LinkedIn profile. It lists other people who will be attending these conferences, and links to their profiles on other social networks so you can learn more about them.

To fit in with the rest of its improvements, LinkedIn has given its overgrown design a haircut. It has cut the number of buttons on the top menu of its homepage to five, from more than ten. They are People, Jobs, Answers, Services and Inbox.

In sum, LinkedIn is trying to cement itself as the center of business networking by creating a set of features that make its large database of business relations more valuable.

You can see this trend emerging by looking at the company’s user data. The average age is 41 and at least one executive-level person in every Fortune 500 company uses the service, LinkedIn tells us.

The company has more than 16 million registered users, and says it is now gaining more than one million new members per month.

Compare all of these developments with Facebook. As Facebook has opened up beyond college students to let anybody join, the recent graduates who joined the site in 2005 and 2006 have brought it into their workplaces. This has led to active Facebook users modifying how they move the site. For example, one friend of mine in the finance industry has modified her profile to remove the college era party pictures in order to appear more professional to her newly-joined coworkers.

Facebook has shown signs it wants to woo business people. For example, it is working on ways for you to divide your friends up into groups according to the type of relationship that you have with them. Then, you can decide which groups of people can see what information about you on the site.

But how significant are all these platforms? LinkedIn’s platform is the most interesting one to launch since Facebook first came out with its own platform, over a year ago. It is specifically focused on helping businesspeople communicate, as the company notes here.

Facebook’s platform — and now, LinkedIn’s — has two complementary components. On the one hand, they both let third parties build applications within the site. On the other hand, they let developers incorporate their social network data into their own sites.

With Facebook’s platform, we imagined developers building useful Facebook applications that used the site’s social data to let you find and work with people more easily.

The idea hasn’t resonated with developers. Only a handful of companies have experimented with it. The better known component of Facebook’s platform is its set of application programming interfaces that let developers build applications within the site. That launched in May, and has drawn more than 10,000 Facebook developers. However, the business models to support these applications are still unproven.

LinkedIn’s user base — and approach to networking — may pay off. The company won’t confirm any other platform partners, but it’s worth noting that Salesforce and Oracle are also OpenSocial members. With this platform, it’s easy to imagine LinkedIn data appearing within Salesforce and Oracle business software, along with these company creating modules that feature information from their software within LinkedIn. The result of this sort of integration: You’d automatically see valuable business connections as you’re working.

LinkedIn, of course, has also been in talks with News Corp about a possible purchase, from what we’ve heard. This platform effort signals that the company is not going to let such talks slow it down.

Business Week screenshot:

updated
Visible Path, a Silicon Valley start-up that offers companies a way for their employees to how their personal contacts are linked to others in their organization and elsewhere, has been bought by a multibillion, international company, according to this CNET article.

Visible Path has remained focused on serving companies — even as more popular consumer-focused networks such as LinkedIn, and now Facebook, have grabbed attention. It’s not clear whether Visibile Path was making money (we wrote about the company here, when it changed its chief executive a few months ago, and started shaking itself up a bit). The news comes as companies get more serious about providing social software to their employees.

We reported earlier about how News Corp. is negotiating to buy LinkedIn.

Visible Path’s service tracks how often you email certain people, how frequently those people respond, and then builds a ranking of your richest contacts, and shows you how those contacts, in turn, are connected with others. It lets you know which of your contacts you can draw on to help reach someone else you might not otherwise know.

Visible Path was working away for years. It was very early to the sector, but wasn’t able to exploit is as quickly as others have. It was backed with $22,7 million from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Menlo Ventures, and Integral Capital Partners.

Update: This version corrected an earlier version that suggested Pringo had acquired Visible Path. That information was clearly wrong.

Here’s the action that you missed over Thanksgiving break:

1. Silicon Valley becoming mobile innovation hub
2. Why Google bought Jaiku
3. LinkedIn drawing suitors?
4. IAC to spend $100M in China
5. NeoEdge launches ad network for casual games
6. Feds may subsidize broadband access

Silicon Valley becoming mobile innovation hub — Despite the U.S. being the laughing stock of the world for its backward mobile networks, Silicon Valley is becoming a center for mobile innovation anyway. Nokia, the large Finnish mobile phone maker, is boosting its activities in Silicon Valley, because of the action here. Nokia’s head of research here, Bob Iannucci, has even been promoted to Nokia’s chief technology officer. The Mercury News has a good story about the emergence of the valley’s strength in mobile, from Apple’s iPhone phenom to Google’s launch of its Android platform, to the surprising number of Finnish companies — BBS, Codenomicon, EB, Navicron and Tracker — that have established offices in the region. After its move to the valley, Nokia bought an intriguing company called Pixto, which lets consumers point a camera phone at an object — a building, an automobile, or a product in a store window — and with a single click call up Web data linked to the image. It uses GPS and image-matching algorithms to recognize the subject. The Mercury News argues Silicon Valley has become more important with globalization, not less.

Why Google bought Jaiku — Speaking of cool Finnish companies getting sucked by Silicon Valley, you’ll recall the Jaiku was recently bought by Google. Jaiku is like Twitter, in that it lets people post short messages about what they are doing. So why did Google chose Jaiku, instead of the homegrown San Francisco company, Twitter. Jonathan Mulholland says its because Jaiku offers location awareness, and that this fits in with its designs for its Android platform:

…when posting status updates Jaiku has the ability to capture and share the location information (neighbourhood, city, country) of the poster in real time. So in addition to a message post Jaiku can provide real time location awareness of users… And how does Jaiku do this? An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a ’status aware address book’, and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability (General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc). So in addition to a message post AND location awareness you also have deep mobile integration sufficient to identify the status of a user as well…Jaiku potentially gives Google the Holy Grail - time relevant, location based targeting of information, personalised to a very high degree. Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability.

LinkedIn growing quickly, attracting suitors — LinkedIn is growing quickly, seeing 189 percent growth over the year through October, faster than the other top ten social networks, according to Nielsen. Now there are rumors that News Corp is looking at buying LinkedIn. Both parties told us “no comment,” though LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman’s response to Techcurnch was one of the most bizarre “no comments” we’ve ever seen.

IAC to create a new business in China — IAC CEO Barry Diller said Saturday that he’ll spend $100 million on a new business in China, and he’ll  also take its search engine, Ask to the fast-growing country. It’s little wonder such initiatives are being taken now that U.S. economy may be slipping into zero growth, or even recession. Diller admits that IAC screwed up eLong, a travel site in China. The initiative will raise IAC’s China investments to $300 million. Details in Wall Street Journal.

NeoEdge launches ad network for casual games –Mountain View, Calif.-based startup NeoEdge, officially launches its ad network for casual games this week, according to GigaOm, but the company doesn’t make clear how its offerings are any different from competitors. We mentioned the company raised $3 million back in June.

Feds may subsidize broadband access — Policy makers overseeing the federal Universal Service Fund have recommended that it be used to offset costs of deploying broadband Internet services in rural areas of the U.S., according to the WSJ. This is something Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign also supports (see our coverage here ).

Two days ago, we reported that LinkedIn had finally added profile pictures to their features list. Now a competitor, Xing, is announcing a slew of new features.

Xing already had profile images. Its users will now have the ability to include more personal information on their profiles, including details about past positions, and a field showing their motivation for being listed on the service (e.g., to find new clients or jobs).

The service is also opening up user’s profiles to mention their profiles on outside sites, including Amazon, eBay, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, del.icio.us, Last.fm, Dopplr, Photobucket and Digg.

The people search engine Spock has made a similar move to incorporate profile information from outside sites. However Spock is much younger, and this could be Xing’s way of heading off incursions from Spock. LinkedIn, meanwhile, has kept a chilly distance from other Web 2.0 services.

The third new feature seeks to facilitate discussions between members. Members will be able to contact each other based on intention; a reporter and a salesman, for instance, would send different queries to other members.

Finally, users can dynamically edit their profile, changing information without going to a separate settings page.

Xing’s ability to quickly iterate and make design improvements may prove it as a worthy competitor to LinkedIn, despite its European origin. The site tends to differ in its friendlier appearance.

On Friday, the social network for professionals, LinkedIn, will go live with its newest feature: User photos.

Why did it take four years to add a feature already offered by every other social network? LinkedIn claims recent user requests for the feature drove the decision. However, Facebook’s swift rise as a place where business professionals also network has also shown how powerful picture-laden profiles can be.

Whether or not Facebook’s success drove the move, LinkedIn still keeps its distance from the Facebook interface in other ways. Only one picture will be allowed, at 80 by 80 pixels, and users will be able to block people outside their network from seeing it. They’ll have the option of blocking photos from other users, important for human resources departments seeking to avoid the appearance of discriminatory hiring practices.

Earlier this month, LinkedIn changed its “groups” feature to make them easier to create and manage — a move that also follows a strong rise at Facebook of its similar group feature. An open API for developer, such as Facebook has, is still in the works; company spokesmen said back in June that it would take about nine months.

The more considered pace of innovation at LinkedIn reflects the site’s conservatism. Before making any move, it carefully weighs the impact on the site’s professional feel. LinkedIn is expanding aggressively outside of the U.S. into countries where its it’s customary for job seekers to add a photo to the CV. So even adding photos can be said to be necessary for professional reasons, according to Kay Luo, LinkedIn’s director of corporate communications.

Its efforts overseas have also helped grow the site’s user base, which has grown strongly over the past two months, bringing total users to 14 million a month (Facebook has about 43 million). Between 230,000 and 250,000 new users join every week, the company reports.

When LinkedIn’s API does go live, one area it may encourage development is making life easier for mobile professionals: “We want to empower users to take their network anywhere they go,” said Luo, in response to questions about the site’s plans.

LinkedIn, the Mountain View, Calif. business contact networking site, has reshuffled its entire top management in recent months, as it readies itself to go public.

In part, it is feasting off the continued exodus from Yahoo. LinkedIn first brought in a former Advent Software executive Dan Nye as chief executive. And yesterday it said Steve Sordello, who resigned from TiVo last week, will be chief financial officer, And it scored two Yahoo execs: Patrick Crane will lead marketing (at Yahoo, he marketed Yahoo Answers), and Anil Khatri will be vice president of engineering (he held the same spot at Yahoo.)

The company’s co-founders Reid Hoffman and Konstantin Guericke have both stepped down from their leadership roles. Last month, Keith Rabois, head of corporate development, departed to Slide, where he is now VP of strategy and business development.

Yesterday, LinkedIn did a big publicity push (see Reuters story), telling news outlets it has doubled membership to nearly 12 million users over the past nine months, and that it projects revenue will be around $100 million — coincidentally the number used by investment bankers as a rule of thumb for when a company is ready to go public. In other reports, Nye made a big deal about how all the execs are earning lower salaries than they were at their former companies — and instead taking equity. LinkedIn makes money from three sources: subscriptions for premium accounts, advertising, and fees from job recruiters.

In other words, this company might even file to go public sometime this fall, after the slow summer, but while the IPO window is still open — even if it won’t comment on exact dates. Reuters says it could be as “early as next year,” but who knows.

The company has raised $30 million from Sequoia Capital, Greylock and Bessemer.

Here’s the latest action:

Page draws attention with helicopter landing — The Google co-founder’s colorful arrival at the Foo Camp this past weekend was captured on film. Scott Beale, always good with imagery, has the clips on his site Laughing Squid.

Thomas Layton takes top job at Metaweb Technologies — Metaweb is one of several companies trying to create a public database to store the world’s digital information. It has garnered considerable hype. It is backed with $15 million from Benchmark Capital and others. It isn’t much of a surprise, then, that Layton comes from another Benchmark company, OpenTable (Benchmark is known to take an active role in recruitment at its companies).

Change at the helm of Topix.com — Co-founder Chris Tolles has become chief executive of the five-year-old local news site. He takes the place of Rich Skrenta. No real reason is given. However, investors have high expectations, having pumped in $15 million recently. Topix was an early news aggregator online, an area which is now filled with competitors.

LinkedIn opens its service to third-party developers — The social network for business professionals says it will open its API over the next several months. This is late, given that most other networks have already taken similar moves, but better late than never (ZDNet’s Dan Farber talks with LinkedIn’s chairman Reid Hoffman).

Local.com wins local search patent — The publicly traded search engine Local.com, which no one has heard of says its patent covers the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location. We don’t know where this will go.

The class difference between Facebook and MySpace — A study suggests users of Facebook are wealthier and more educated than those of MySpace — not completely a surprise, given Facebook was started as a social network for colleges. And it was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard student, with some classmates, and it spread among the elite schools before moving on to other groups. The culture of that group has been reflected in the site’s design and overall tone.

Fairtilizer not a great name for Web site — Anyway, its the name of the latest online music community site reviewed by ReadWriteWeb.

Michael Bloomberg toast of Silicon Valley — The mayor of New York, who is mulling an independent presidential bid, was hosted by Silicon Valley investor Sandy Robertson at a dinner here last Sunday, featuring guests s