Below is an extract of an article written by Emma Barnett of the Daily Telegraph , Saturday March 20th

LinkedIn, currently the largest professional network, with three million UK members and 60 million worldwide, (compared to Facebook’s 23 million UK membership and 300 million users worldwide) is about to integrate its service with Microsoft Outlook, the world’s most popular work email service. This development, says Kevin Eyres, European managing director of LinkedIn, marks the tipping point for the service.

“The fact that people will soon be able to see who somebody is and who they are connected to professionally, using this tool and without even leaving their in-box, will take LinkedIn’s usefulness to the next level,” he explains.

Admittedly the service, despite a slow start – it took 477 days to get the first one million people signed up – is now experiencing rapid growth. As Eyres puts it, LinkedIn’s ambition is to be people’s “de facto reference point for professional identities.”

LinkedIn, which was founded by web entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, has enjoyed profitability since 2007 (though figures are not disclosed, because it’s a private company) and has three revenue streams: advertising, recruitment data services and subscriptions, the latter of which allows people to contact and see people’s profiles outside their own or their contacts’ networks.

Groups are also playing a larger role in the way people use the service, with well established organisations, such as the Institute of Directors, creating their own space on the site where their members can talk about issues affecting them, and help shape the topics up for discussion at the group’s next “offline” meeting.

However, despite LinkedIn’s growing reach and fame, it is not the only player in the professional network space and many people are still unsure of how to make the most of their membership, often leaving their profiles untouched for months on end.

The full article can be read here.

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