LinkedIn celebrates 10th birthday

Happy tenth birthday, LinkedIn! The world’s most widely used professional social networking website turned 10 this Sunday. Within the 10 years of its existence, LinkedIn has gone from being just a website to being a public company with 225 million members that has several other services like Pulse and SlideShare under its wings.

Co-founded by Reid Hoffman in 2003, the humble start up has moved from 4,500 members in its first month, to over 200 million at the end of 10 years. More importantly, LinkedIn has changed the way social networking behaves. It has gone beyond being a place where you connect with friends and share cat pictures to a place where you connect with future and past employers and build a career.

Happy birthday, LinkedIn!

Earlier this week, LinkedIn revealed its Q1 earnings report for 2013. It beat expectations to post a revenue figure of $324.7 million and non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.45. The professional social network also provided a break down of its user base around the world.

A whopping 77 million members of LinkedIn are situated in the United States of America. India comes in second with 19 million members followed by Brazil, with 12 million members. Now standing at a figure of 225 million members, LinkedIn breached the 200 million mark earlier this year in January.

Only last month LinkedIn announced its overhauled bouquet of visually rich mobile apps. Its first major update in two years saw big changes with design and navigation. Easy on the eye, LinkedIn’s new apps let you move around the service easily with sliding shortcut panes and customisable shortcuts.

LinkedIn has stepped on the gas since the past year in order to not just give a better experience to the users but also to expand its services. On the eve of its ninth birthday, LinkedIn made what was to be the first in the line of major purchases, when it bought SlideShare for $118.75 million.

Growing at the rate of 2 members per second

Post the presentation-sharing platform, LinkedIn closed the purchase of news reader app Pulse last month. The deal was closed for $90 million, which consisted of 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash.

“Our vision at LinkedIn is to create economic opportunity for every professional in the world,” writes an ambitious Hoffman about plans for the future. With a number of acquisitions under its belt and a strong worldwide user base, LinkedIn seems set for another decade of redefining professional networking.