Indeed, LinkedIn made something of a big deal out of the occasion.  Kevin Eyres, the managing director of LinkedIn’s operations in Europe, wrote on the LinkedIn Blog, "To mark hitting yesterday’s special milestone, one of our co-founders Reid Hoffman made a special trip to the UK to personally thank and celebrate with some our members at a networking event (naturally) in central London last night."

Eyres then continued, "As the conversation flowed it was humbling to see the variety of our membership all in one room; from financiers to software developers, journalists to entrepreneurs and public sector figures to marketers, all these and more were represented from young rising stars to established industry leaders and CEOs."

Depending on what sort of destination Eyres and Hoffman have in mind, LinkedIn has a ways to go, of course.  On the financial front, Hoffman indicated that an IPO is not in the company’s immediate future.  And in terms of traffic, Facebook hit 3.5 million users in the UK more than two years ago (and has since seen growth skyrocket).

Still, netting 3 million members is an impressive achievement, and Eyres promised that more interesting stuff is on the way.

Related Articles:

> Now LinkedIn Will Be Featured In A Lot More Apps

> LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook To Forge Ties

> LinkedIn, Twitter Connect Through Status Updates

A post on the LinkedIn Blog explained, "When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing.  And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool."

The integration makes a fair amount of sense since so many people use Twitter for self-promotion.  Job hunters will now be able to more easily enlist their entire Twitter networks in the search.  And at the same time, potential employers will be able to more easily see how individuals operate on a day-to-day basis.

Folks who alternate work-related tweets with "this is what I had for lunch" material are covered, too, though, since the new feature will allow users to just select certain tweets to be shared.

Related Articles:

> Twitter Analytics Service Gets Off To Great Start

> LinkedIn Tests A New Design

> Facebook Most Widely Used Network Among Businesses

Ideas Project was designed to bring together influential "big thinkers" to contemplate the ideas that matter most to the future of communications. "It is a new kind of conversation platform aimed at uncovering the connections between these thought leaders and their disruptive ideas," Nokia says in a release.

Hoffman certainly knows a thing or two about social data. LinkedIn is an incredibly successful social network focused on business networking.

"Once you have all these piles of data, people will build products out of the synthesis of this information," explains Hoffman. "I think the Web 2.0 platform concerning actual identities and relationships is really just at the beginning stages of its growth–we’re not close to even the midpoint of this development."

"As the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman redefined online professional networking, making a seminal contribution to the rise of social media," says Valerie Buckingham, Director of Technology Marketing, Nokia. "Now Hoffman is once again setting his sites on the future, exploring how companies will use the growing base of online social networking information as a foundation for business innovation."

Ideas Project also features ideas from Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, and a number of other influential thought leaders. What do you think of the project?

LinkedIn has now announced the move of making president, Jeff Weiner, the new CEO of the company. Weiner came over from Yahoo in January and this move is not raising any eyebrows. Hoffman had stepped into the CEO role for the past 6 months or so after Dan Nye left in December of last year after two years in the post. Now the transition to Weiner looks complete.

cnet reports

“LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the Internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals,” Hoffman said in a release. “Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together.”

LinkedIn claims 42 million members which makes their audience bigger than Twitter but far smaller than Facebook’s 200 million plus members. What LinkedIn can claim that neither of the other two can is that it

hopes to be profitable this year for the second year in a row; it makes money not only from ads, but from premium subscriptions and “corporate solutions.”

Profitable? For a second year in a row? Not often we use that word here in the present tense when it comes to social media companies let alone talking about starting a ‘profitable year streak’. In the past, Hoffman has expressed the desire to go public and last year was looking for a billion dollar valuation when raising $53 million. If you want to play the “What is LinkedIn worth now?” game go right ahead. In this market it looks like anyone’s guess is as good as the next.

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During Weiner’s time in the President role, he has overseen all operations and played a defining role in developing and excuting the company’s strategy on a global scale.

Speaking of that global scale, LinkedIn announced this week that it was investigating ways to make LinkedIn available in more languages. Out of the users the company polled, the majority said they’d help out with this for upgraded accounts.

"Working closely with Reid and the team over the past six months exceeded all of my expectations coming into the company," says Weiner. "I couldn’t be more excited about our progress to date, and the opportunity ahead of us."

"LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals," says Hoffman. "Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together."

Before becoming interim president at LinkedIn, Weiner held executive titles with Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. He also held leadership positions at Yahoo such as executive vice president of the company’s network division.

Marketing Shift, which notes that LinkedIn just came off its most successful quarter yet, takes a look at the network’s "three-pronged" revenue model:

   1.  Upgraded Acccounts: Business, Business Plus and Pro Accounts provide extra features, including thorough lists of who’s searched for you and your company.

   2. Hiring services.

   3. Advertising comparable to the Wall Street Journal Demographic

LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman recently appeared on Charlie Rose. Here is an excerpt (via Vator.tv) from that interview that showcases a little of his philosophy.

LinkedIn does not have the users of a Facebook, but its niche is much narrower than that. Considering that fact, they’re doing quite well in the social networking space. According to MarketingShift, LinkedIn has a new user joining every second. The state of the economy and the amount of job losses are surely factors that further boost the usefulness of the kind of networking LinkedIn provides.

However you make use of arguably the world’s most useful business networking site, you may not know much about the man behind its success. AP’s Michael Liedtke takes a close look at LinkedIn’s mixed success and profiles its co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Hoffman, 40, has put that principle to work by mining his own vast network of Silicon Valley connections to rake in one Internet jackpot after another.

A college friendship led Hoffman to PayPal and his first windfall when eBay Inc. bought the online payment service for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, he has become even wealthier by investing in other Internet startups he discovered through friends and former colleagues.

Along the way, Hoffman also used some of his PayPal proceeds to help start LinkedIn, an online business-networking service that helps professionals like him realize the value of their contacts from the past and present.

If you dig deep, you’ll also find these interesting nuggets about LinkedIn:

• More than 1 million people join LinkedIn each month
• LinkedIn’s projected 2008 revenue is somewhere between $75 million and $100 million.
• The site had doubled users over the past year. It now has 18 million profiles.
• LinkedIn will likely file for an IPO or sell by 2010.
• Hoffman has 1500 LinkedIn connections–sadly I’m not one of them.

What do you think of LinkedIn? Do you use it? What features (if any) is it missing?

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