After nearly eight years of providing a social networking playground to business professionals, LinkedIn has now reached 100 million users worldwide.

The Website was officially launched in May 2003, and by the end of its first month, 4,500 people had signed up to become a part of the network. Since that time, LinkedIn has gained roughly one million new members each month, which equates to about one individual signing up every second.

Currently the company has a worldwide membership that includes people from over 200 countries and territories. Fifty-six million of the 100 million users on LinkedIn are outside of the United States.

The site allows its members to build their own contact network of people from a variety of industries, find jobs, post photos and work histories, and follow companies. It can also link to other profiles, like Twitter, to accept feeds. One of LinkedIn's most enticing features is the ability to show how many degrees separate you from another person, allowing you to easily and quickly build valuable business networks with people and companies with which you might not have otherwise had contact.

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