TMCnews Featured Article

LinkedIn, a social networking site for business professionals, recently debuted a new feature that may radically change the way that subscribers use its service.

At the TechCrunch Disrupt show on Wednesday, the company launched the beta version of LinkedIn Signal, a product that allows users to search for and filter through the comments and updates of their contacts. The new service makes LinkedIn more of an interactive social networking tool than a simple web resource for business contacts. LinkedIn Signal even sorts through Twitter updates and posts them to a user's homepage.

The new feature "gives you a whole new way to consume information and news that’s most relevant to you as a professional,” wrote LinkedIn’s Estaban Kozak in a recent blog post. “Signal is the first of many LinkedIn products aimed at making it really easy for all professionals to glean only the most relevant insights from the never-ending stream of status updates and news."

"In other words, Signal allows all professionals to make sense of the noise that surrounds them today," he added.

Before the launch of the new feature, LinkedIn members could only see the posts that were created by their contacts. Now, users will be able to stream through almost an endless amount of information that is posted by fellow members.

Subscribers can filter through this data by region, school, industry and their primary, secondary and tertiary networks, according to Digital Trends. Users can also set up alerts to notify them of certain topic discussions. Moreover, Signal features a trending links page where the most shared topics on LinkedIn are displayed.

The service is currently available to a small selection of users. It will be officially launched later this year.

In related news, LinkedIn has also revamped its company-sponsored pages to offer users more information about enterprises that are registered with the social networking site.

Beecher Tuttle is a Web Editor for TMCnet. He has extensive experience writing and editing for print publications and online news websites. He has specialized in a variety of industries, including health care technology, politics and education. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf