LinkedIn

LinkedIn users hunting for a job may want to spruce up their profiles.

A recent survey from Jobvite found that 93 percent of job recruiters tap into LinkedIn to find qualified candidates, up from 87 percent last year and 78 percent in 2010. But the other popular social networks are growing in influence as well.

In second place, Facebook is used by 66 percent of the recruiters polled, up from 55 percent last year. And Twitter is on the watch list among 54 percent of those surveyed, up from 47 percent last year.

Overall, 92 percent of employers and recruiters … Read more

Has it come to this? Do we need corporate CRM tools to manage our individual relationships?

The startup Cloze has launched a utility that scores every relationship you have with your e-mail contacts, based on when and how you communicate with people. The scores look like Klout numbers, but they're personal to you. Cloze uses those scores to rank your people, flagging the top-scorers for followup when you don't respond to their messages. Creepy? Maybe. But fairly handy.

Cloze was designed as a work tool. Founders Dan Foody and Alex Cote said they wanted to create … Read more

Don't care how, just watch Monday's Update now:

The future PlayStation experience could involve streaming your video games. Sony is buying the cloud-based game provider Gaikai for $380 million in shares. Gaikai lets you stream games like Mass Effect 3 with just an Internet connection. No downloading. No discs. Gaikai began working with Samsung and LG to bring video games to Smart TVs. This acquistion could cause a few ripple effects in the gaming industry, not to mention we could be seeing streaming as an option for a future Playstation device. It could even expand the Playstation footprint … Read more

A startup with seed money from the likes of Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter, and Oprah Winfrey hopes to create a successful mashup of a professional and crowdsourced news network, a social-media site like Twitter, and a video hub like YouTube.

"There are practical solutions to [create] more jobs, lower crime, [provide] better education," #waywire co-founder and Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker told TechCrunch. "If more people could find their voice and be part of the national dialogue, we could solve these problems."

#waywire, which plans … Read more

LinkedIn users will no longer be able to publish tweets to their profiles on the service.

LinkedIn said that the change follows a decision by Twitter to get stricter about APIs, effectively ending a practice that had existed the last two-and-a-half years. You'll still be able to broadcast LinkedIn updates to Twitter. Just not the other way around. Sweet -- if you're Twitter, that is.

Writing about the new policy, Twitter's Michael Sippey said this was part of a larger effort to ensure that "the core Twitter consumption experience" includes "a consistent set of … Read more

LinkedIn has posted an update on what it's doing to protect its members following the appearance, earlier this week, of millions of member passwords online.

"First," the post says, "it's important to know that compromised passwords were not published with corresponding e-mail logins. At the time they were initially published, the vast majority of those passwords remained hashed, i.e., encoded, but unfortunately a subset of the passwords was decoded. Again, we are not aware of any member information being published at any time in connection with the list of stolen passwords. The only information … Read more

Three companies have warned users in the last 24 hours that their customers' passwords appear to be floating around on the Internet, including on a Russian forum where hackers boasted about cracking them. I suspect more companies will follow suit.

Curious about what this all means to you? Read on.

What exactly happened? Earlier this week a file containing what looked like 6.5 million passwords and another with 1.5 million passwords was discovered on a Russian hacker forum on InsidePro.com, which offers password-cracking tools. Someone using the handle "dwdm" had posted the original list and … Read more

LinkedIn said today that it has contacted police about the compromise of its users' passwords that hackers were actively cracking earlier this week.

"Yesterday we learned that approximately 6.5 million hashed LinkedIn passwords were posted on a hacker site. Most of the passwords on the list appear to remain hashed and hard to decode, but unfortunately a small subset of the hashed passwords was decoded and published," Vicente Silveira, a director at the professional social-networking site, wrote in a blog post. "We are also actively working with law enforcement, which is investigating this matter."

The … Read more

It's time to pony up for prepaid iPhones, avoid password scams and drop that mayor obsession:

The iPhone is coming to Virgin Mobile at the end of June. But you'll have to drop a hefty $650 to get the iPhone 4S, since there's no two-year contract. Plans start at $30 a month. It's cheaper in the long run to go prepaid with this plan instead of spending $200 upfront and paying for a more expensive monthly bill for two years (but you'll be limited with talk minutes). Virgin is on the Sprint network.

If Android … Read more