LinkedIn is one of the best ways to connect with colleagues, professionals and folks who share a common work culture. While Facebook is known for connecting with old friends, classmates or distant relatives, LinkedIn is still one of the trusted playgrounds where like minded people can connect and grow their network or discuss about anything related to their academics, profession, career and work.

The best thing about LinkedIn is probably your online resume and the “endorsements” by other members or friends in your network. Quite recently the site did launched an online resume builder which was a big hit among LinkedIn users across the globe.

LinkedIn Today: LinkedIn’s Way of Personalizing Shared Content

With more than 90 million users across the globe, the company has grown really big over the last couple of years.

The site has recently released a new service called LinkedIn Today, which accumulates headlines across the web and puts them in your LinkedIn news feed. Stories and links are fetched depending upon the type of your network and with whom you are connecting to, what people are sharing and what your existing connections are saying and sharing in their LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.

While LinkedIn today is not a generic news portal like Google News or Techmeme, LinkedIn wants it’s users to cut through the noise and engage with more relevant stories according to their interests, likings and the genre of network. Nice idea !

Paper.li Clone ? Not Really

At first glance, LinkedIn looks like other online feed aggregators (e.g Paper.li) who work solely on Twitter hash tags, mentions and presents the top shared items from your Twitter feed in a newspaper format. The working UI looks similar but there are quite a few differences between the two.

First, LinkedIn allows no convention to pull specific stories from your social circle. Stories and links are ranked automatically and shown on LinkedIn Today, you can click through the sections and open the corresponding articles in a new browser tab.

Second, LinkedIn’s news portal refers meaningful connections according to the “top stories” and stuff you’re interested in. This is surely a great way to grow your LinkedIn network and follow sources that matter.

The biggest advantage however is the ability to filter custom items from the portal and search for stories from specific sources. For example: you can filter out all iPad2 stories or filter anything about Microsoft from the right sidebar of LinkedIntoday.

The following video outlines the basic idea behind LinkedIn today:

Graph Your LinkedIn Connections On a Map

In addition to the news portal, LinkedIn has also unveiled an experimental tool at inmaps.linkedinlabs.com which map all your LinkedIn connections in a social graph. Following is an example graph made using LinkedIn’s social graph tool:

The only criteria for using the social maps feature of LinkedIn is that you should have at least 50 or more connections.

Related: Optimize your LinkedIn Profile for search engines