LinkedIn the business networking website crossed the 100 mn subscriber mark this week (1mn+ in AU), and released an interesting infographic about its demographics. The user base appears to skew towards middle to senior management in the 35+ age group, perhaps looking for career advancement by leveraging their networks connections and recommendations.

The site has graduated from being a pure networking website to being more like a business version of Facebook complete with Likes, Shares and Status updates. You can also link it with your Twitter account to share all or selective tweets with your LinkedIn connections. I don’t spend a lot of time on LinkedIn but most of my current or past business contacts are connections and it allows me to keep track of what they are up to. Most people seem to think of LinkedIn only when they are job hunting or during uncertain times which is probably why its member base increased strongly during and since the GFC crisis.

In an attempt to make itself more a part of people’s daily routine like a real social network, the site launched LinkedIn Today a personalised news aggregator site. The new feature can be customised to suit your needs and you can also share or save articles for later. I like to think of it as my personal newspaper as I can pick industries and news sources to follow from the intuitive suggestions the feature recommends for me. The template has made it easy for me to scan the tech headlines that made news overnight in the US since I’m in Australia. It puts all the top news above the fold, and my chosen industries and content sources as separate sections on the top menu (screenshot below). 

LinkedIn Today is less cumbersome than scrolling through a long list of tweets in a Twitter app on my smart phone every few hours. At the very least it’s definitely a complimentary tool to Twitter lists and Google alerts as a news aggregation service. Have you used LinkedIn Today and how do you think it compares to other news monitoring tools?