LinkedIn membership, Microsoft’s search complaint, Moshi Monsters

LinkedIn now has 100 million members and is picking up a million new ones every week, according to new figures from the professional social network.

Keen to emphasise its global reach, LinkedIn says more than half of its users (some 56 million) come from outside the US.

Twitter is five, IE9 launches, endangered languages

It started, with a tweet. And in five years Twitter has gone from “inviting coworkers” to a non-stop ‘fire hose’ sending 140 million messages every day.

460,000 new accounts are created daily and it plays a part in revolutions, emergencies and even meltdowns among deluded celebrities who believe they’re “winning”.

But despite the undeniably impressive numbers Twitter released to celebrate its first five years, for now the site is still little brother to Facebook’s Big Brother.

LinkedIn Today, Spotify milestone, piracy sloganeering

LinkedIn has stepped into the content curation space, hoping its business focus will give it the edge over existing services and “deliver the day’s top news”.

The idea is appealing. Every day online information overload threatens, and the situation is severely exacerbated by social media. But can LinkedIn cut through this? It’s betting industry-segmented news links, generated from the content its 90 million members share, will prove a winning addition to its social network.

But on first glance LinkedIn Today, which comes across like Paper.li on steroids, feels a bit lightweight – the most important story in the world today is that people are queuing for an iPad 2? It also raises the question, as the number of these services increases, of who will curate the curators for us.

The iPad second coming, Android apps, Facebook privacy (again)

The second coming of Apple’s iPad looks set to continue the company’s lead in the tablet market it re-energised and dominates, at least for now.

Unveiling the iPad 2 this week Apple chief executive Steve Jobs had some impressive numbers to boast of, including 15 million iPads sold in just nine months, and he must have had no small amount of satisfaction noting that’s more than every tablet PC Microsoft ever sold.

Summing up Apple’s current market-leading position Sarah Rotman Epps said – with understatement, “Apple understands desire”. However, “the tablet wars are far from over” the Forrester analyst added, suggesting serious competition may yet come form Sony, Microsoft or even a ‘disruptor’ candidate like Amazon (see below).

Twitter hissy fit, new Google algorithm, Wikipedia growth plans

UberSocial is the number one Blackberry Twitter app

Twitter has decided that while a thriving eco-system of third party apps may have done wonders for the uptake of its service, there comes a point when putting the upstarts in their place is necessary.

The first to suffer from the company’s harder line was UberMedia, which controls 20% of all tweets through a stable of mobile apps that includes Tweetdeck, Echofon, UberTwitter and Twidroyd. It was the last two of these that incurred Twitter’s wrath and lost access to the service for four days.

They returned after a short blackout last weekend (with UberTwitter now the brand name-respecting UberSocial), but UberMedia’s UberCurrent app remains offline. Clearly a sign of things to come, just days later the TwapperKeeper app (whose name begs the question: when do the prizes for awful app names get given out) cut a number of features to remain in Twitter’s good graces after the service ‘requested’ some changes.

Google Social Search update, having your cake, US digital divide

You may start seeing more friends and colleagues in your search results as Google continues to take increasing notice of social media sites, expanding the Social Search feature it launched in 2009.

The company will now mix social search results throughout query results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom) and add notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites.

The expanded Social Search will be rolled out over the next couple of weeks, but only on Google.com and only in English for now (this video shows how it should work).