I typically think of LinkedIn as a sort of glorified address book. I know it's a safe place to keep all my contacts, and should I ever need to find new and interesting people (read: help me or a friend get a job), I can do so.
Though, poking around today I found two useful features that I think will make LinkedIn a little more active for me.
Personal RSS Feed
Under Account & Settings » RSS Settings you'll find Your Private RSS Feed. This is, as the name suggests, a feed of all the activity that's going on relative to your connections. You can find out who your friends are connecting to and what their up to. It's essentially another event stream, but one more work related than the usual Facebook and Twitter feed.
I think this feed will work well in the Gmail Web Clips area, as the feed isn't essential. With web clips, you get access to these nuggets of information every so often, and if they useful, you can follow up. Otherwise, you can just ignore them.
Status Updates
Apparently, LinkedIn got on the status updates bandwagon, allowing users to tell their contacts what they are currently working on.
I've been using Twitter for exactly this purposes for some time now. Using a site like ping.fm, it's possible to post onto both Twitter and LinkedIn at the same time. The result is that it's now possible to get the status updates out to yet another group of people - those who are paying more attention to LinkedIn than to say Twitter.
In other words, just like Facebook can be used as a distribution network, so can LinkedIn.
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