• by Shankar Gupta , October 16, 2006

Online business networking service LinkedIn today will launch a new category aimed at connecting members with professionals who provide household services like gardening and child care.

Konstantin Guericke, vice president of marketing for LinkedIn, said that users of the service were asking for the ability to receive personal service recommendations from their business contacts. "A lot of our users are very busy people, so they tend to employ a lot of services to keep the home running," he said, adding that members have said told the company they ask their connections for such referrals.

To get the new recommendations category started, LinkedIn culled its 100,000 recommendations for service providers for non-business-related services--coming up with roughly 20,000, said Guericke, and organizing them into a new section for non-business recommendations.

Currently, the section does not have any ads, and Guericke said there are no plans to include them. "We wanted to keep this 'your network recommends' section ad-free," he said. "Your ticket to entry is to have a recommendation from a client."