LinkedIn has launched a new Android app in beta. The app lets users view updates, search for people, respond to invitations, and keep in touch with connections. 

I can’t remember the last time we’ve seen so many hacking (and related) stories in the news, particularly in which so many big name brands were affected in such a short amount of time. Last week, of course the big stories were about "Anonymous" taking down MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, etc. 

Don’t expect LinkedIn to introduce its own version of the fail whale (as Google recently did with a "whale fail" image) anytime soon.  This weekend, LinkedIn added a new data center, ensuring that the professional networking site will stay in working order.

Given Google’s hiring standards, it’s a decent bet that even the janitors have more coding ability than the developers at some other firms.  An impending personnel loss may be all that much worse for the search giant, then, as an employee with the title "Tech Lead" has decided to leave for LinkedIn.

All over the Web, clusters of Like, Tweet, Digg, Reddit, and Buzz buttons may grow a little larger today.  LinkedIn unveiled a "share" button of its own this morning, and aside from the organization’s late start, there’s no obvious reason why it wouldn’t catch on in many circles.

Indeed, Bloomberg, Forbes, and SiliconValley.com have already integrated the new LinkedIn share button, which means the site’s secured some impressive backers.  And LinkedIn’s also made sure that no one needs a lot of technical expertise in order to follow suit.

How much time do you spend trying to keep with all your friends on the various social platforms? Chances are it’s quite a bit. Most of your friends are probably on Facebook, some are hard die heard Twitterers, and some won’t let go of MySpace.

Product recommendations can be useful to both buyers and sellers, putting good offerings in the spotlight and helping sales proceed.  LinkedIn members may be happy (if surprised) to hear, then, that the network has started to show product recommendations on companies’ profile pages.

You can see an example of how this works below.  While a little different from what you might expect of a site designed for professional networking, it shouldn’t turn LinkedIn into a messy hub for shoppers.

LinkedIn’s board of directors has grown again.  This morning, it gained a new member in Stan Meresman, who’s accumulated quite a lot of experience dealing with companies of all sizes.

At the moment, Meresman is a board member at Hytrust (a private company), Meru Networks (which is public with a market cap of about $250 million), and Riverbed Technology (public with a market cap of $4 billion).

In August, RIM announced the BlackBerry Torch and BlackBerry 6 operating system aimed at delivering "integrated and uncompromising capabilities for consumers and business professionals". Now LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals has a new app designed for this device and operating system. 

LinkedIn announced today that users can now customize their profiles with five new profile sections: publications, languages, skills, certifications, and patents. If you just click on "Add Sections" on you "Edit Profile" page, you can see the whole list of available options. 

Twitter, LinkedIn, and especially Facebook are valuable marketing tools in a quantifiable sense, according to new data from Eventbrite.  Eventbrite, which deals in online ticket sales, found that a single "share" on Facebook is worth about $2.52.

Note that Eventbrite’s exact figures may not hold true for businesses selling things other than tickets to conferences, concerts, fundraisers, and so on.  Just the same, the company conducted its study over 12 weeks, making its findings hard to question.

LinkedIn fans who would like to get their hands on a couple new features are in luck.  Today, something called LinkedIn Labs launched, and as the name might lead you to expect, it acts to spotlight tools and potential upgrades that haven’t been released to the general public.

LinkedIn has launched a new beta product called Career Explorer, aimed at college graduates.

"Students now have the ability to explore different career paths based on their school, level of education, and desired industry," explains LinkedIn’s DJ Patil. "In addition to visualizing various career paths, they’ll also be able to find relevant job opportunities, top companies, estimated salary ranges as well as the people in their network who can get them there."

LinkedIn has announced a new beta product called LinkedIn Signal, which the company describes as a new way to view, search and sort your stream of status updates and news. 

LinkedIn Signal comes with five main features: filtering by  browsing only relevant status updates from your stream, search for keywords, topics or people across the stream, getting an auto updated real-time stream with rich content, find trending links across any relevant topic, and  seeing who’s shared any of those trending links. It also lets you save real time searches. 

LinkedIn made a couple of announcements today. First was an update to its Company Follow Feature, and second was the introduction of its new Career Pages. 

Company Follow has an updated look and feel with better customization, more personalized insights for professionals, and a new Career tab for both companies and professionals. 

LinkedIn and Microsoft announced today that Windows Live Messenger users can now link their Windows Live profile to LinkedIn. There are four main areas Microsoft says its focused on with its LinkedIn integration. These are:

- Keeping your contact list organized with auto contact linking across Hotmail, Messenger and the rest of Windows Live

- Helping you use Messenger to keep up with what your LinkedIn contacts are doing.

- Making it simple to share updates from Messenger to your LinkedIn contacts.

LinkedIn announced that it  has agreed to acquire ChoiceVendor, which is a company that provides ratings and reviews of B2B service providers in more than 70 categories across the United States.

ChoiceVendor is based in San Francisco and was founded by CEO Yan-David Erlich and VP of engineering Rama Ranganath.

Although it’s perhaps not a worldwide phenomenon like Facebook, new statistics from comScore indicate that LinkedIn is at least an international success.  It turns out the network is more popular in the Netherlands and Ireland than in the U.S., and it has quite a lot of fans in other countries, as well.

One thing we should note: these popularity rankings were adjusted to account for the number of local Internet users.  So no one’s suggesting that there are more LinkedIn users in Denmark than in the entire United Kingdom.

LinkedIn has launched new search filter features for LinkedIn Recruiter. The company has taken advanced search and refinement filters that have been available, and added them to some new places.

TweetUp, a search engine/ad network that has been based on Twitter, is now changing its name to PostUp, and is adding support for both Facebook and LinkedIn. The search engine will expand to include both bios and updates posted to Facebook and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has announced the launch of LinkedIn for iPhone version 3.2, which the company says makes it easier to stay up to date and find important changes happening in your professional network.

The app comes with some changes to how LinkedIn displays profile updates from connections. You can see more info about what changed from All Updates or Profiles.