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LinkedIn adds Facebook-like alerts

The social-networking site for professionals continues to revamp its site. This time, it adds a notification stream that may look familiar.

Donna Tam Staff Writer / News
Donna Tam covers Amazon and other fun stuff for CNET News. She is a San Francisco native who enjoys feasting, merrymaking, checking her Gmail and reading her Kindle.
Donna Tam
2 min read
LinkedIn
LinkedIn hums along on its promised site redesign, rolling out a notifications stream today that may strike a familiar cord with Facebook users.

The professional networking site adds icons to the top left corner of a user homepage, including a little flag that will feature a red circle if you have any new activity, according to a blog post written by LinkedIn Associate Product Manager Angela Yang.

"Launching today is our new notifications feature, which will keep you notified in real-time when someone likes what you've shared on LinkedIn, views your profile, accepts your invitation, and much more," Yang writes.

The new feature will take several weeks to go live for all LinkedIn members, and push notifications for Android and iOS devices are also in the works.

It's all a part of LinkedIn's grand redesign plans to simplify site and grow it as an everyday tool.

When LinkedIn launched a redesign of its news page in July, it added some commenting features that reminded folks of Facebook, but the company said that it was merely expanding its already available commenting features.

That may have been the case, but the new notifications stream -- which pops up in a box when you click on the icon -- looks, and seems to function, similar to what Facebook uses to engage users.

Not a bad tactic for LinkedIn if it wants visitors to come back to the site more frequently. The company wants to be the place where all the grown ups go to get news and connections that are relevant to their professional lives.