Gose Stories

Love this.

As a huge fan of LinkedIn, this is great news for those of us who are LI junkies.

This morning, at the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, I have the great pleasure of announcing one of our most important mobile efforts for 2009: the launch of LinkedIn for BlackBerry.  Needless to say, this launch has been hotly anticipated by the millions of LinkedIn members who make the BlackBerry their mobile business platform of choice.

LinkedIn for BlackBerry: Home

Imagine walking into any interview, any customer engagement or client meeting with the ability to look up the details on over 50 million professionals worldwide, in real-time.  Soon this will be a reality, as this application will bring the powerful capabilities of LinkedIn to your BlackBerry.

LinkedIn for BlackBerry: Search

LinkedIn for BlackBerry: Profile

We’ve worked hard to develop an application that takes advantage of the unique capabilities of the BlackBerry platform.  LinkedIn for BlackBerry will also include deep integration with the native Messages, Contacts & Calendar applications on the BlackBerry platform.  For example, here is an early screenshot of the native BlackBerry Messages application, with LinkedIn invitations and one-to-one messages integrated into the inbox:

LinkedIn for BlackBerry: Messages

LinkedIn for BlackBerry will join our existing suite of mobile products by the end of this year, marking the next step in our continuing effort to bring LinkedIn to wherever you work.  This is just the beginning – expect continued enhancements and expansions of the LinkedIn mobile platform in 2010.

See you at the BlackBerry Developer Conference 2009. To stay updated on BlackBerry developments, join the LinkedIn for BlackBerry Group!

It's about time...

Who knew the airplane was such a smart ass?!

Imagine being a 19-year old kid and having an opposing campus produce shirts like this for gameday. That has be tough on a student-athlete.

(And yes, Ohio State does have student-athletes.)

Click on the link to see some of the other images "customers" submitted of the product. Pretty funny.

A couple days ago, we launched several new features aimed at enhancing the professional conversation in LinkedIn groups. We call one of those features “following”.

Following makes it easier for you to see contributions made by your connections and other people you value within your groups. To get you started, you’re already following all of your connections and they’re following you. But it doesn’t stop with your connections: to follow someone who is not a connection, just click “Follow Their Name” under their name on a discussion page or on the Member page in your group.

Now when you go to your My Groups page, you’ll see updates about what the specific people you’re following have contributed to the groups you share. Updates from the people you’re following (and your updates to the people who are following you) also appear on the Overview page of each group you share. All of this makes it faster and easier to interact with your own personal “group within the group.”

For more information about Following, check out our FAQ.

Go ahead, check out your groups and start following!

I am a huge fan of what LinkedIn could do, but the site's functionality hasn't kept up with other sites. I think this is a solid improvement and certainly gives hardcore users another valuable feature.

Posterous is one of those web apps that comes along and brightens up the world. It is a gift that keeps on giving. And here’s why: it’s flexible, and it’s really easy to use.

The core USP that underpins Posterous is the ability to post content quickly from a range of sources. To create posts you can use the bookmarklet, email, or the Posterous web editor. It's about the fastest way of publishing content to the web and I for one love it.

So how can you use Posterous to get the best out of it? I have a few ideas...

A personal blog

I’ve fallen in and out of love with blogging on many occasions but it has never been so easy to maintain a personal blog. While Posterous doesn’t yet cater for indie publishers, it is the perfect tool for lapsed or wannabe bloggers.

A collaborative blog

Posterous caters for multiple authors, who can all contribute posts and comments, and will receive notifications once new content is published. If blogging feels like too much effort then why not invite like-minded friends or colleagues to get in on the act? 

A private blog

I’ve been working on a new startup recently and we thought it would be a good idea to start a private group blog. We use Posterous to share ideas relating to the launch plans, PR and marketing strategies, event planning, networking, branding, and design / user testing. Posterous helps compile and collate our ideas, as well as bookmarking interesting things we see elsewhere.

A rich bookmarking tool

Online bookmarking tools like Delicious are great discovery engines but I was never quite bitten by the bookmarking bug. Storing headlines and links doesn’t quite do it for me, even when supplemented with notes and tags. Posterous allows you to easily upload, store, tag and view videos, images, text, files and audio. As such I personally use it as a kind of interactive scrapbook, where I compile random Youtube videos, Flickr images, and links to websites that I want to keep a note of. Rich bookmarking has come of age.

An image host for your existing blog / website

Flickr is a beautiful creature but I’ve found Posterous to be a little bit quicker to use for those times when you just want to upload an image and grab the link. All you need to do is email image attachments and Posterous will publish them. It will also send you an email to with a link to that specific post, allowing you to grab the image URL to use on your blog (using Posterous as the image host). Better still, Posterous will send your image uploads directly to your Flickr account if you want it to.

A conduit to publishing content all over the web

Following on from the last point, Posterous allows you to automatically distribute them to other sites (e.g. Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). As such it can be used as a hub to push out your content onto multiple sites. 

A PR / cuttings file

I don’t think it’s particularly cool to replicate and republish third party blog articles in full on the web, but a private Posterous blog could be a good way of creating an interactive PR folder. It will help you to easily store articles, clippings and links.

A project / client management tool

Basecamp is one of the best low-cost tools for coordinating projects with clients but it has a few limitations. A private Posterous blog may help extend Basecamp. Invite clients to brainstorming and bookmarking sessions, or to share files and other project assets. 

A research tool

Researching a project? Posterous can be useful whether you’re doing this individually or as part of a team. You can share and store documents, spreadsheets, pictures, braindumps and rich bookmarks.

A videoblog or podcasting channel

Posterous can host video, so you can create a series of generic or subject-specific videos. It will push out your videos to YouTube and other platforms if you tell it to. And it will also embed videos from third party video sites, should you wish to aggregate them from elsewhere. Audioheads can also use Posterous as a podcasting platform, which can be subscribed to via iTunes.

To immediately start your Posterous blog simply email post@posterous.com. Use the subject line as your headline. If you attach an image or other file it should make sense of it. You will receive an email after your post is published, after which you can log in and customise your new blog. Easy!