Sometime in November last year, LinkedIn started rolling out some Twitter integration features. If you’re one of those LinkedIn members who integrated your LinkedIn accounts with Twitter, you might also want to go deeper into these integration and install the Tweets app.

This new LinkedIn feature lets you easily find and keep track of your LinkedIn connections on both LinkedIn and Twitter. Once you’ve installed that Tweet app, you can access this from your Profile page by clicking on the “more” tab which you can find at the top of your LinkedIn profile page. Clicking on that “more” tab will display your Twitter public timeline including tweets from people you follow. From that page, you can post tweet to your account.

The new Tweet app also has a new module called – “connection to follow.” What this module does is to give you recommendations on new people to follow which are your LinkedIn contacts.

Another nice feature of the Tweet app is the “connections” category which list down your LinkedIn connections who have already installed the Tweet app. From there you can see their Twitter information, follow or unfollow them and see a sample of their last tweets.

If you’re into Twitter lists, the new LinkedIn Tweet app also lets you create a dynamic Twitter list consisting of your LinkedIn connections. This list displays tweets of your LinkedIn contacts and are updated real-time. It’s like your usual Twitter list built into your LinkedIn accounts.

Alright, enough of this blabber. If you’re into LinkedIn and Twitter, might as well integrate these two accounts.  You may install the LinkedIn Tweet app from this link.

You know MSN, right? It’s Microsoft’s equivalent of the Yahoo content network. If you’re a Microsoft fan and an Internet Explorer user, this must be your browser’s start-up page.  For the past couple of months, MSN announced that it was redesigning its homepage and so the site is finally being rolled out to U.S. MSN users.

And what does the new MSN homepage brings to the table? Here’s a quick rundown of its new features:

• It’s all about Bing – the Bing search box is now larger and is located front and center of your MSN homepage to let you search as quickly as possible. The new homepage also gives you popular topics and an increased prominence of Popular searches. There’s also a new TrendWatch feature which highlights the day’s top movers on Twitter. And finally, an increased focus on editorial programming of search-related content such as videos and images.
• MSN Local Edition – MSN also has a localized version which gives you specific information depending on your local area. The new homepage now lets you personalize MSN Local and save up to 3 cities to follow.  The new feauture also brings in HyperLocal tweets which uses Bing search to power up local tweets. And MSN Local Edition now offers 3,000 news video clips a week across 36 local markets.
• More HD videos on the homepage – in-line HD video is now being offered on the MSN homepage with minimal buffering.
• Social networking on the homepage – Check your Hotmail, Messenger, Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live accounts on the MSN homepage.

And so LinkedIn continues to improve on its site features and functionality. The popular business-oriented social networking sites has just improved on one of its most useful network-building feature called “People You May Know,” a powerful way of finding long lost business contacts as well as for building your professional identity. LinkedIn has combined this feature with another great feature called “faceted search.”

With these two useful LinkedIn features integrated, it is now easier to sort through the list of people your may know by companies and schools. You will now be able to easily page through all of your suggestions on the landing page and quickly sort through them by company or school as well as find out which connections you have in common with other LinkedIn members.

From the landing page of the filtered “People You May Know” suggestions, you can filter the results further by various ways to help you find the business contacts that you may have been looking for or possibly chanced upon somebody which you didn’t think you can reconnect to again.

To see the list of people on LinkedIn that you may know, simply click on the “See More” link on the People You May Know box on your LinkedIn profile page. From there you can start scouring through the list and hopefully gets to find contacts and continue building your LinkedIn network.

For awhile I thought Lunchwalla which we featured not so long ago was related to Gowalla. So, It was quite surprising to know that the site which lets you organize everyday social events like breakfast, lunch, dinner, movies and more has integrated with Foursquare. So this means that aside from voting in on what to do, you can now check-in when you get to the events you helped organized.

If you’re a regular Foursquare user and have also used Lunchwalla before, this integration would complement each other now. Meaning, all the check-ins you make on the events you organized or helped organized through Lunchwalla will be counted to your quest for mayorship of the place where the event was held. This is in addition to the fact that your check-in appears on your Foursquare profile which you can also display as an update to your Facebook profile. It’s like hitting three social networking sites with one check-in.

Best of all, if you’ve got hooked into Lunchwalla since we’ve featured it on this blog, you must be earning Lunchwalla points right now.  Of course, you still remember that those Lunchwalla points can earn you some schwags from participating merchants, right?

And while we’re at it, the Foursquare – Lunchwalla integration also lets you import your Foursquare friends into your Lunchwalla contacts list. So, planning events and coordinating them with your friends is now easier.

Incidentally, Lunchwalla is holding a gig right now which might earn you free tickets to see Iron Man 2. So, if you haven’t checked Lunchwalla yet, this gig might entice you to start using Lunchwalla.

I just installed Gowalla on my iPad and was immediately blown away by its nice interface the moment I fire up the app. Gowalla has just launched their iPad app and is now available for free download from the iPad App Store.

Gowalla’s main page displays a Google Map right-fitted into the iPad’s huge screen showing the spots where you’re friends and other Gowalla members have checked-in.  If you turn your iPad to landscape mode, the screen will be split into two, with the left column displaying Activity, Spots and Passport and the right column displaying the Google Map.

If you clicked on any recent activity of your friends, the right column will display your friend’s activity as well as the different comments put in by his friends. You can add your comments as well. Now if you click on the spot where your friend has checked-in the right column will display a placeholder for that spot with a Google map, information about the spot and the list of people who have been on that spot. If you’re in the said spot, you can also check-in. Or if you’re not into the said spot but wants to go there you can tap on  ”Get Directions” and Google Maps will show you the fastest route to get there.

Next to the Activity tab is the “Spots” tab. Tap on it and the huge Google Map will be displayed with icons on specific places. This is one aspect which makes Gowalla for the iPad fun. The icons are huge and adds excitement to the overall Gowalla interface. More →

Finally, business-oriented social networking site LinkedIn is staying true to its monicker. LinkedIn  has just rolled out a much delayed feature that lets you easily follow company profiles on LinkedIn. In case you’re more of a Facebook user, you’d know that this is somewhat similar to the “become a fan” feature, which incidentally was changed to “like.”

Rationalizing the roll-out of this feature, the LinkedIn official blog states that this will help LinkedIn memeber to stay in the loop on new developments, potential business opportunities or even job opportunities by simply following a company.  Following a company, just like following a brand profile in Facebook also lets you get the first hand information about developments at companies you follow.

So, how do you follow a company on LinkedIn. There are various ways to do so. First, you can click through any of the companies listed on your LinkedIn contacts’ profiles. Once you find a company that interest you, you simply mouse-over on that company and the “Follow Company” icon will appear on a hover bar.

You can also follow a company right on the company’s profile whenever you chanced upon them as you search on LinkedIn. To easily find a company profile, you can check out the “more” drop-down list from LinkedIn’s homepage.

Now here’s the interesting part. LinkedIn also allows you to choose the volume of updates that you want to receive from various companies you follow. You can select the type, frequency and format of updates as well.

Like the features so far? So, what are you waiting for? Start following those companies now and wait for the fruits of what you are about to do, hopefully the soonest time possible.

Adaptive Blue has just updated it’s free browser add-on, GetGlue.com with personalized new releases for each user, real-time suggestions, the ability to quickly decide if a book, a movie, or album is for you as well as a new interface.

Let’s take a look at the new features which were just rolled out by GetGlue:

Personalized new releases – GetGlue scans new releases in movies, music, and books and give your the ones that are most relevant to you based on what you have already liked before.  These movies pertain to your favorite genre which could either be a new album from your favorite artists, or even books on particular topic that interests you.

Real time recommendations – GetGlue automatically updates your recommended movies, music and books everytime you encountered new releases. You can quickly browse through these list by clicking on the “Recommended” filter.

Things you’ve already liked – GetGlue shows you similar things that you’ve already liked while you visit a movie, an album or a book on GetGlue.com or anywhere on the web. It also shows you reviews and liked items by your friends, neighbors and the entire GetGlue community who have similar tastes as you.

New activity streams - GetGlue’s new activity streams compress daily activities of various users. This gives you the ability to explore more items from these activity streams.

New interface - Finally, GetGlue has also redesigned the site’s overall interface – now bigger, shiner, simpler and definitely more fun.

So, there. Are you using GetGlue? Do you like the new features so far?

Don’t look now folks, but pretty soon,  your favorite restaurants and other business establishments might soon be offering various discounts, freebies and other promotional gigs in cooperation with Foursquare. Yes Foursquare, you it right?  This is because Foursquare has just launched a business strategy that encourages establishment owners to use its service to engage mobile customers with specials and give them the ability to track how their venues is performing over time – through venue analytics.

Foursquare Business provides simple self-service tools that would allow you, as a business manager, to cook up with various kinds of special gigs that would attract customers to your business establishments. Specifically Foursquare Business will let you created the following specials:

• Mayor specials can be unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days).
• Count-based specials are unlocked when a user checks in a certain number of times.
• Frequency-based specials are unlocked every so many check-ins.
• Wildcard specials are always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the special.

What’s cool about this is that Foursquare has mobile apps in three major mobile platforms – Android, iPhone and BlackBerry. And Foursquare can use this mobile apps to send notices to potential customers nearby to possibly invite them to check out your Foursquare promotional gigs.

To use Foursquare’s business tools, all you need to do is claim your venue. Once you’ve done that you can have access to various Foursquare venue analytics tools that will let you view:

• most recent visitors
• most frequent visitors
• the times of day people check in
• total number of unique visitors
• a histogram of check-ins per day

So, what are you waiting for? Get into Foursquare and claim your venue now before somebody else takes it.

There’s a lot of things going on right now at the Facebook camp, coinciding with their f8 Developer’s Conference. But with the several new things that Facebook unveiled today, one thing is certain, Mark Zuckerberg and his gang is out to conquer the social digital world. You still got time, either you opt-in or opt-out now.

Facebook’s plan of dominating the digital world is a three-point attack right now. This is only its initial salvo. I’m pretty sure there are more to come. In the meantime, let’s take at look at these three strategies which were just announced at the f8 gig.

Docs for Facebook

Zuckerberg knows quite well that Google has already dominated the search dominion and it would take a lot of effort to beat Google into this game. So, why not attack something which Google is starting to dominate – the cloud computing space. Enter Docs for Facebook, which interestingly Facebook is launching in cooperation with Microsoft.

Simply put, Docs for Facebook is like Google Docs, only this time it’s main focus is document collaboration and sharing within the Facebook ecosystem and not just anywhere else.  Docs for Facebook is pretty simple right now. You can create documents or upload existing ones and then share it with your Facebook friends, via Facebook and within Facebook.  Can it give Google Docs a run for its money? We’ll know soon enough, once it becomes available to the public.

Facebook’s Take on Social Recommendation with Yelp

Gowalla and Foursqure might have something to be worried about.  Facebook is finally taking the social recommendation, location-aware social networking space for a spin. And it brought along Yelp, Gowalla and Foursquare’s fiercest rivals.

With the Facebook and Yelp partnership, you will be able to see which among your Facebook friends have reviewed a business and read their reviews. You can also find out who among your friends have like a particular business as well as  view feed of what your friends are doing.

Facebook and Pandora Spike Up the Social Music Sphere

There’s not much details yet about how Facebook and Pandora are teaming up. But one thing is for sure, MySpace which has been dominating the social music niche has something to be worried about.  All we know is that when you log in to Facebook and go to Pandora for the first time, the music site can immediately start playings songs from bands you’ve liked across the web. It will also show you friends who also like the same songs as you while you are playing or listening to a music.

There you go, three major strategies that will trigger the start of Facebook’s digital world domination. Are you ready for it?

It’s good to know that despite their not so great traffic and overall ranking as a social networking site, LinkedIn is still trying to improve its services, features and functionality. In a way the site is trying its best to be in tune with the norm among popular social media services that include the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz among others.

So now, LinkedIn has just announced several new features that would make sharing news within your LinkedIn networks easy. Since, LinkedIn is business social network, you all know how valuable news information are among business networks.

Here are the new features of LinkedIn’s news sharing functionality:

1. Get complete control over who sees what you’re sharing – be it everyone, individual, a group or connections.

2. Post article excerpts and images to what you are sharing. This will attract more attention from people you share it with. This feature lets you customize your message to people you are sharing the news with.

3. Preview, edit and delete posts before your LinkedIn contacts noticed that you’ve type something incorrectly.

4. Like and re-sharing of news feature in a single click. It also allows you to share news bits to multiple LinkedIn contacts.

5. Improved off-site sharing experience that lets you share news items you encounter while reading online newspapers such as WSJ and NYT.

6. LinkedIn’s very own URL shortener (lnkd.in) when sharing link to news items.

7. Attribution of re-shared items to the person who originally shared the items with you.

8. Share items on your LinkedIn profile to those who view your profile.

There you go, 8 new sharing features of LinkedIn that hopefully would make you a more informed LinkedIn member.