LinkedIn launches ‘Signal’ in beta for professional news streams

LinkedIn has today announced ‘Signal’ its answer to the real-time news feeds, with a hope that professionals will now turn to LinkedIn as their main news and social media stream. LinkedIn says that “Signal is the first of many LinkedIn products.”

So what exactly is Signal? Well, according to LinkedIn, these are the main aspects of Signal:

• Browse only relevant status updates from your stream
• Search for keywords, topics or people across the stream
• Get an auto updated real-time stream with rich content
• Find the hottest trending links across any relevant topic
• Who’s Shared This Link?
• Saved real time searches

All of this sounds interesting, but if you’ve been a reader of TNW for awhile, you’ll know that we have been pretty confused about what LinkedIn has been waiting for, and that the professional marketplace might even be more of an easy target for Google to go after (instead of Facebook). However, from the screenshots and the description LinkedIn has given about Signal and the screenshots that they’ve provided, it would seem to be a large improvement. We’ll hopefully get in on the beta and try it out then get back to you with more in-depth analysis and thoughts about Signal. LinkedIn says that:

“Starting today, we’re going to be rolling out Signal to different groups of our members. We’ll be collecting feedback and analyzing usage patterns for the next few weeks, while we rollout the feature to the rest of our users.”