Facebook Photo Unpost Ever regret drunkenly uploading that picture to Facebook? We know a couple of people who could have used this.

Twitter Undershare: Is there something you need to tell the entire Internet about? Actually, there probably isn't. But something about the message-broadcasting service seems to beg people to share too much, 140 characters at a time. You can delete posts, but they still end up sent to people's cell phones and indexed in search engines. Where's the "untweet" button?

Tumblr Unreblog: What happens when your girlfriend follows the same cutie you do on David Karp's kiddy blogging service, and notices your habit of reblogging the Tumblrette's every last quip, pic, and quote? Ah, for a way to instantly zap all of your reblogs! It's either that, or propose a threesome.

LinkedIn Snub: So you meet a "social media marketer" — i.e., someone trying to get paid to talk to their friends on Twitter all day — at a party. You grudgingly exchange business cards. The next day, you get the inevitable connection request on LinkedIn — even though you barely know the twit, let alone feel comfortable recommending their work. The feature LinkedIn needs: A way to politely acknowledge your interaction without actually exposing your whole list of industry connections to them.

Untexting: If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile can shuttle text messages from phone to phone through the magical ether, surely they can reach into your friends' devices and delete that hastily sent SMS before it's read and the damage is done.

Get to work, geeks! There's too much information on the Internet as it is. Time to make the world safe for undersharing!

LinkedIn's voluminous founder, Reid Hoffman (shown here), envisioned the site as the embodiment of his voracious appetite for meeting business partners. Social networks? Useless fluff, when everyone who walks through the door of Palo Alto's Coupa Cafe is someone Hoffman could hire, invest in, or strike a deal with.

Despite its business focus, LinkedIn has struggled to make money. Its main revenue stream, premium accounts for heavy users, depends heavily on recruiters, who are looking for jobs themselves these days. Under Nye, an experienced software salesman, the company toyed with becoming a so-called "expert network," an operation which matches up people hungry for knowledge with those who have it. Stock traders, especially, pay handsomely to talk to executives in companies whose shares they want to trade — a part of the business which can veer on breaking insider-trading laws, if contacts aren't carefully monitored.

Bain, the management-consulting firm, was so interested in the potential for this kind of matchmaking that it invested in LinkedIn's most recent $75 million round, which valued the company at $1 billion. But the ineptness of LinkedIn's middle management meant that the expert-network product never got off the ground. And the business as a whole badly missed the financial projections management had given investors, which infuriated Bain and others.

This may explain why Hoffman abruptly cancelled a trip to Japan, where he was due to speak at a conference, to oversee the company's recent layoffs. The company has hired a former Google executive, Dipchand "Deep" Nishar, and Jeff Weiner, a former top executive at Yahoo, has stepped in as its interim president.

Hoffman may have to do far more to save his company. A gregarious fellow who has invested in a host of startups, Hoffman is famously nice and good-hearted. And he prefers the dreamy work of strategy to the hard tasks of building a business. Is he prepared to fix LinkedIn? Or does he still think his company's problems can all be solved by making the right connections?

Have you heard that Linkedin is going to be announcing layoffs [Wednesday]? Happy holidays I suppose. how much time do their employees have before they need to pack up their desks?
Linkedin runs scared during the down turn of the economy. If they've just raised all that money why are they doing layoffs? Or are they just cleaning house?

Linkedin last year canned their superman and then fired a director for comments made to a female employee....what else is going on behind those doors?

The CEO, is he really incharge or is Reid still incharge, you should ask the employees. They have a habit of hiring executives that have no experience in what they are suppose to be doing at linkedin. Let's take a look at the recent vp of hr Arvind, what hr experience does he have? Was he hired because he's a friend of reid? do they hire the right people to do the right jobs? Have you looked at their directors or vps?

I have close connections to the company. Sequoia is telling all their companies to get rid of 10% of their employee base. Reid doesn't want to, but can he stand up to Sequoia? Can the money LinkedIn raised disappear? Are they running scared with their tales between their legs? So what will they do, is this just the beginning? Why are they still hiring if they are doing layoffs? Who's on the top of the list? Any of their heavy execs? With offers just accepted by people to go to Linkedin should they be worried about the choice they've made? The new apps they released last week were weak. They had so many bugs in the new apps, and weren't even able to release all of them because of the bugs. Who's doing the QA work at Linkedin? Rumor is they lost their QA director recently too.

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In the last 3 months the flying bullshit has gotten so thick that all of us below senior management have started to be able to systematically disprove half of what management tells us. Even management themselves change things they had formerly declared as factual.

If you ask any of the top three managers what our strategy is for an open API vs. threats from Google etc they will all three give you a different answer. Wait a week [and] ask again and then they all give new different answers.

We miss our objectives on every feature add, interface change, hardware move and anything else management declares. LIAP is a non-scaling disaster.

Worst of all we have now missed every financial objective set by Bain Capital after investing $50M in us. Not once but twice we have missed revenue and bottom line goals. The debate about who's fault this is is lively enough that one can tickle each manager for trouble and they will throw each other under the LinkedIn bus. (By the way management got a minibus to ferry almost no one to work from San Francisco because Google does it, (CEO penis envy) but the staff joke that the bus is to throw people under in this culture where the PR is hot but the business is not)

Missing numbers is not a secret, management stood up at an off-site in Monterey and said "we are going to every group and telling them the facts that we missed our goals again and that Bain is really mad" This is really comforting to the staff when the next day the same guy is on CNBCs websit saying we are profitable (not even close).

The only thing we seem good at doing on time is spending too much money. Management told us this summer that Goldman Sachs was investing $25M more in us and the details would be forthcoming. (said it was a done deal) (scared to death that we would need this) well I just learned GS said NO! 2 months ago, management just hasn't bothered to tell us.

It's a shame because it was a good company that had endured enough before it became so full of false confidence that it passed on the window of opportunity that was there to sell for good money.

What the fuck is going on over at LinkedIn again? They've lost 2 more directors in the past 30 days, for what looks like STUPID reasons. Simple crap like reprimanding employees for fucking things up. They lost their Director of Operations a few days ago, their Director of IT a couple of weeks back and Director of Business Operations. I've got it on good authority that there were some other housecleaning items done in the past few weeks as well within their Operations team. It's like a fucking morgue.

Word is that the employees are taking the upper hand with complaints against management, and that upper management is all too happy to get rid of people just before they hit their 1-year stock vesting. Don't get on the shit list of upper management or your time will come.

One guy in particular keeps coming up with people I talk with — Lloyd Taylor. he's the guy who came over from Google. And the door couldn't have hit him in the ass fast enough, and now that he's being told to go back and "play nicely" with the Google team, he's finding that he has no friends over there. They won't even deal with him any more. It sure looks like his frustration is being taken out on his management team.

I was present during a recent all-hands meeting where Dan and Reid made repeated references to "culture" and "culture changes", speaking as if they know they're changing in the wrong way. But this isn't the way to deal with it.

I hold so little hope for them any more. Just fucking sell to someone and get this over with already.

The first reason an interactive agency buyer chooses an ad network for his clients is because the people who work there take him out to lunch.

But the second reason buyers choose one ad network over the other 299 is that they can trust the ad network to carefully manage its audience and the publishing partners it includes. The first requirement LinkedIn has down: Its users are rich and easily targeted by industry, seniority, company size, geography, gender, and number of connections. If publishers sign up for its network, LinkedIn can detect when those users visit other websites, using its personalized information to target ads.

But to meet the second requirement, LinkedIn needs to carefully restrict the publishers it allows into its ad network. This could prove more challenging for the startup. BusinessWeek, CNBC, and the New York Times already pipe content into LinkedIn, but it's unclear if they plan to carry LinkedIn's ads, too. There's some incentive for them to join up: LinkedIn says it charges advertisers between $30 and $76.50 per thousand ad impressions, an attractive rate for almost any publisher. LinkedIn might have trouble recruiting those types of publishers because they, too, want to start their own ad networks. Even though the world doesn't need another one.

Dieting and exercising suck. You are not going to have fun. The science is simple: eat fewer calories than your burn. Start quantifying. I use FitDay to track calories. Run a 1,000 calorie per day deficit. Go easy on the drinking. Take up smoking — a zero-calorie alternative. Eat one serving. Drink more coffee, an appetite suppressant. Low-fat ice cream has around 120 calories per half cup. After two weeks, your stomach will shrink. Step two is exercise. It's awful. Use an elliptical machine. Treadmills make you run. One hour per day, hard. You should be close to vomiting. Easy, huh?

(Photo by mandj98)

Regulators frown on free communications between knowledgeable company executives and information-hungry investors. LinkedIn offers "compliance" tools, but those tools amount to letting the fox electronically monitor the henhouse. Hedgies surely realize this, and will see LinkedIn's lax policies as a selling point. (Other firms which connect investors with company insiders have, at some expense, created systems which allow the experts' employers, not just the investment firms, to monitor contacts.)

If it gets in trouble, LinkedIn will likely plea that it didn't know how its networking site was being used — the standard we're-just-a-platform dodge. But it will be hard to claim that for two reasons. First, LinkedIn is touting the account managers it's providing who will actively help traders use the service. Second, CEO Dan Nye previously worked at Advent Software, a company which provides portfolio-management software to Wall Street firms. It's not like he's unfamiliar with the SEC's disclosure and monitoring requirements. Rather, one has to think he knows just how expensive complying with those rules are, and that rejiggering LinkedIn's software to obey them will make LinkedIn Research a nonstarter.

It's not a stretch to imagine how an ambitious government prosecutor could make a case for LinkedIn aiding and abetting insider trading. The law doesn't even require that money change hands; exchanging inside information for a thumbs-up reference on LinkedIn could very well qualify as a breach of the rules.

But that assumes anyone in Washington or New York is paying attention. Unlikely, given the mortgage mess. LinkedIn will likely go public on the basis of its hedge fund-juiced revenues long before an overtaxed SEC gets around to looking at how, exactly, the avaricious traders of Greenwich are getting their information.