Linked in

Linked In is a social networking website for people in professional occupations. Founded in December 2002 and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking. As of June 2013, LinkedIn reports more than 225 million acquired users in more than 200 countries and territories.
LinkedIn’s CEO is Jeff Weiner, previously a Yahoo! Ink, executive. The company was founded by Reid Hoffman and founding team members from PayPal and Socialnet.com (Allen Blue, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Valliant, Lee Howler, Konstantin Guericke, Stephen Blitzed, David Eves, Ian Mc Nish, Yan Pupate, and Chris Saccharin).

One purpose of the site is to allow registered users to maintain a list of contact details of people with whom they have some level of relationship, called Connections. Users can invite anyone (whether a site user or not) to become a connection. However, if the invitee selects “I don’t know” or “Spam”, this counts against the inviter. If the inviter gets too many of such responses, the account may be restricted or closed.

The feature LinkedIn Answers, allowed users to ask questions for the community to answer. This feature was free, and the main difference from the latter was that questions are potentially more business oriented, and the identity of the people asking and answering question is known.
In October 2008, LinkedIn enabled an “applications plat from” that allows other online services to be embedded within a member’s profile page.

Among the initial applications were an Amazon Reading List that allows LinkedIn members to display books they are reading, a connection to Trip it, and a Six Apart, Word Press and Type Pad application that allows members to display their latest blog postings within their LinkedIn profile.

A mobile version of the site was launched in February 2008, which gives access to a reduced feature set over a mobile phone.

LinkedIn allows users to research companies with which they may be interested in working. When typing the name of a given company in the search box, statistics about the company are provided.
In July 2011, LinkedIn launched a new feature allowing companies to include an “Apply with LinkedIn” button on job listing pages. The new plug-in will allow potential employees to apply for positions using their LinkedIn profiles as resumes.