I’m not sure how many people read LinkedIn’s blog, but from the looks of my heavily recruiting-laden online social network, not many recruiters in my network do. At least I don’t see people in my network chatting about what LinkedIn just decided to share with the world, which is surprising to me given how cool it is. Hopefully this post will correct that. :-)

LinkedIn’s most recent blog post introduced LinkedIn Labs to the world, as well as released 500 special Signal invitations to celebrate. They are first come, first serve, and as of the time of this post, there were still some left!

LinkedIn Labs

LinkedIn is making some of their internal projects and Hackday competition winners publicly available, including NewIn 2.0, ChromeIn, Instant Search, and Signal:

Yes, very similar in concept to Google Labs, but who cares?

I think it’s cool that LinkedIn employees are experimenting, exploring and encouraged to be innovative. This gives us some insight into LinkedIn’s culture and values.

I’ve already played around with Signal, installed ChromeIn, performed some “Linstant  searches” (did I just coin a phrase?), and watched in real-time as people joined LinkedIn. In fact, I’m watching NewIn 2.0 show me the newest LinkedIn members on my 2nd monitor right now. The screenshot doesn’t do it justice.

Explore LinkedIn Labs

LinkedIn warns in their blog post that some of the the projects shared in LinkedIn Labs may be live for only a few weeks, so if you haven’t already, spend some time exploring it.

Be sure to let LinkedIn know what you think, and maybe even give them some ideas on what you would like to see hacked together next!

And don’t forget to try and snag access to Signal if you don’t already have it. The special invitations won’t last long!