LinkedIn is probably the largest professional network service in the world at the time of this writing & this article is just a quick segment about the history of this network anyone can read if they are interested. It was founded on May 5th of 2003 in Mountain View, California in the United States. The site was founded by Reid Hoffman and many individuals who helped with finding PayPal and Socialnet.com. By August 2004, LinkedIn gained a million users, an impressive milestone, and by March 2006, LinkedIn officially made a profit. By 2007, LinkedIn had reached 10 million users and the year after that achievement, the social media site finally released a mobile app that would allow mobile users to utilize the platform directly from their smartphones. In October of 2010, LinkedIn was ranked by Silicon Valley Insider as the 10th most valuable startup in America and by December of that year, LinkedIn was valued at $1.575 billion US Dollars. By 2016, Microsoft bought out LinkedIn and made it its' subsidiary. To this day, Microsoft still owns LinkedIn but allows the giant to act as its own independent entity mostly. Now, LinkedIn has over seven hundred forty million members using the site
LinkedIn has been a good place for business-to-business marketing. Since 2017, about 94% of B2B marketers have used LinkedIn to distribute content. It is also a decent place for users to find jobs and form professional relationships. It has also become a proper platform for creators who want to show off what they have been doing professionally or talk about professional topics. This year, LinkedIn released a ‘Creator Mode’ that would allow users to ‘showcase their activity and insights on LinkedIn’ & select hashtags related to topics said users tend to frequently post about. It also allows those utilizing the Creator Mode to adjust profile backgrounds to show any live streams or broadcasts they are a part of in real-time.
LinkedIn is available in many countries across the globe and is available in over twenty-four languages around the world including Arabic, Czech, Turkish, Swedish, and Romanian. However, LinkedIn is available in over 200 countries, but there are also many nations where the service is restricted or banned. The policy of LinkedIn states that “we do not allow member accounts or access to our site from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria”, so someone living in Syria or Iran who wants to use this platform to talk with other professionals might be out of luck unless they find a workaround. The platform is also banned in Russia, Kazakhstan, and is no longer functional in China. Still, most places in the world allow you to use LinkedIn without any issues.
Another important thing about LinkedIn is how they contributed to open source projects, something that I personally like since I see open source software as the future & important to progress in the field of information technology. Apache Kafka (a program for processing data in a stream and network-based messaging) was built and open-sourced at LinkedIn in 2011. LinkedIn also worked on Apache DataFu, a Hadoop library for processing large amounts of data. In fact, LinkedIn’s engineering team has a long list of open-source projects they are currently working with that you can see at this URL: https://engineering.linkedin.com/content/engineering/en-us/open-source.
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