LinkedIn (Beta) ...

Social networking site LinkedIn is launching a new look and is on-line with a beta version of their new look.

LinkedIn is promoting a new "go beyond the connection" tagline to coincide with the new launch.

I have found LinkedIn to be a terrific resource in promoting Terry Lyons Sports Marketing LLC and for general job networking. It is a terrific way to re-connect with industry sources and business relationships.

This from C-Net News:

Along with the redesign comes LinkedIn News, a set of headlines aggregated from about 10,000 sites and blogs that are tailored to be directly relevant to a user's company, industry, and competitors. This feature is being rolled out to a limited number of LinkedIn users and will be more widely available in early 2008.

But of more interest to the geek crowd may be "InApps" (short for Intelligent Applications), LinkedIn's answer to the myriad developer platforms that have emerged in the wake of the Facebook Platform. But InApps won't bring food fights and zombies to LinkedIn, something that became clear early on when executives started hinting that the company would unveil a developer initiative. Rather, this will be a select group of productivity applications including internal widgets (a calendar of conferences, for example) and code for porting LinkedIn functions to external Web sites.

LinkedIn is also a partner in Google's somewhat stalled OpenSocial initiative, and the company has said that InApps' structure "(includes) the ability to develop applications that will run within LinkedIn using the OpenSocial development model."

"The goal of the Intelligent Applications Platform is to help make our users more effective by providing them with access to the intelligence of their professional network both on LinkedIn and on other sites they visit to get work done," LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye said in a statement. "Our focus is 100 percent professional, so we will be working with select business partners to build high value, high productivity applications."

One of LinkedIn's inaugural partners, BusinessWeek, has used InApps to create links on its Web site that lead to LinkedIn profiles and company information.