• TechCrunch, Tuesday, December 11, 2007 1 PM

After years of middling success as a social network for professionals, LinkedIn is suddenly the sector's hottest B2B site. Recently, Web measurement firm Nielson Online pegged the company's growth at 189 percent year over year in October, beating Facebook and MySpace. Success has made the company more ambitious. On Monday, LinkedIn unveiled changes it hopes will draw better user engagement and more ad revenue.

Among the changes the company is lining up are a new homepage, on-site messaging, news articles from around the Web and "network updates" (read: a Facebook-esque news feed). On-site messaging will be a feature of the new homepage. Third-place prominence will go to the news feed, which displays the site activity of those in your network.

The news article aggregator is the most compelling of the new features because it requires no effort on the part of its users. Instead, LinkedIn will use their network data and its own technology to determine the most relevant articles for each user. That should give users' profiles a more sector-specific feel. Users can filter news articles by most read, company, competitors and industry.

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