LinkedIn CEO on 'grown up' social networking

Accusations that LinkedIn is getting overrun with sales people and recruitment people
My advice is only connect to people you know. I don't connect with recruiters. If any recruiter reaches out to me, I decline it. We have a button that says 'I don't know this person'. When someone sends you an invitation to connect, if you hit [that] button, we will restrict the person's account. This is another big difference between LinkedIn and Facebook right. If somebody posts a photo on LinkedIn that is considered inappropriate, if three people tag the photo as inappropriate, unprofessional or promotional, the photo comes down. So the photo comes down and the member is notified and has to contact our customer serviced group to get a new photo up there. If a person asks a questions in the answers area and it's considered promotional the question comes down. So we empower the community to maintain the quality.

The second answer to the question is we actually look at the behaviour inside the network. We run reports and we ask who is doing what in the network and we try to monitor the quality to see if there are any quantitative trends that would indicate that the network is being abused or that the quality is diminishing. All of the data says it's not being overrun. Everything that we have seen says in no way is the experience is degrading, in fact the experience is increasing because more people have complete profiles and higher quality people are in the network. It's now very common for big name folks to be on LinkedIn, CEOs of companies, certainly executives, executive vice-presidents and a lot of very well-known people are on there now - so it's credible.

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Third party applications
We actually do not yet have third party applications running inside of LinkedIn. We announced that we were embracing Google's Open Social platform and we will have applications by third parties on LinkedIn later in the year. There's a pent up demand of companies that are interested in doing that. We will approve every company in order to make sure we maintain this professionalism. That's coming later in the year.

LinkedIn on other sites
Rolling out that functionality on businesweek.com is imminent. It'll be coming very soon. It's a really cool feature. The idea is let's enrich the world wide web by allowing you to leverage your LinkedIn network in other places. So if you're on Business Week and you're reading an article about IBM you can hover your mouse over the word IBM and you will see a drop down that shows how many people in your network are connected to IBM and then you can click on it and you can learn more about who exactly are those people and what exactly is your connection into IBM.

Competition from other social network technologies like Second Life
We are big believers in focus and our focus is on making professionals more effective and productive. When one looks at [other networks] they're interesting, those are fun sites that are being used by lots of people, but that's not us. We are really focused on keeping a clean user experience, it's a professional look and feel that allows people to accomplish their tasks and gather valuable information quickly.

We don't value ourselves based on how many page views we serve up, we value ourselves based on how useful people find the tool. We can evaluate that by looking at things like how often people are coming back, how long they're staying on the site, how many people are buying subscriptions, what are the attrition rates of subscriptions. Those are the kind of things that we focus on and where we sort of assess our value.

LinkedIn's future plans
We are in the process of rolling out a redesigned website - it's going to have pretty different look. It's in Beta testing right now. It allows us to run the Open Social applications - there's an area where you can add and drop modules on the homepage. We've integrated news and through that we also allow you to share those news articles with your colleagues and we show you which are the most read articles inside of your company. So that's a pretty significant change. There's a bunch of stuff that does make for a better user experience related to network updates - who answered what questions, who asked what question, who took a new job, who added a photo. It's just a good design - it's menu driven, instead of tab driven.

We will be rolling out LinkedIn in multiple languages. We're already the largest professional network in Europe and we have not made it available in a foreign language yet so in 2008 we will be making it available in a number of foreign languages. It would obviously be those [languages] that serve the big markets - initially our focus is Europe.

We're incredibly excited about it. When you see how business is being conducted across the European continent, across these country lines and you see how successful LinkedIn has already been in English only, it gives us great confidence and excitement about what's to come.

We're not cutting any corners here and we're not trying to do anything superficial or shallow, we're trying to build with quality, build the infrastructure and network of a strong durable company and have exceptionally high standards for everything that we're doing and that's really critical to what we're trying to become. Jump in the water's warm!