LinkedIn Reaches 200 Million Member Mark

On Wednesday, LinkedIn announced that it now has over 200 Million Registered Users.

In the blog post reporting the milestone, Senior VP of Products and User Experience Deep Nishar says that the business networking site has “representation in more than 200 countries and territories” and that they are serving their “members in 19 languages around the world”.

LinkedIn has also created an infographic breaking down their 200 million members into interesting and easily-digested statistics.

For example, the five countries with the most members on LinkedIn are as follows:

1. United States Of America, 74 million
2. India, 18 million
3. Brazil, 11 million
4. United Kingdom, 11 million
5. Canada, 7 million

Richard Branson is still the most followed person on LinkedIn with over 1,230,000 followers, having surpassed the 1 million mark in late November. Barack Obama (617,000), Deepak Chopra MD (373,000), Anthony Robbins (258,000) and Jeff Weiner (240,000) make up the rest of the top five.

The infographic also shows the top five most represented industries on LinkedIn:

1. IT and IT Services, 4 million
2. Finance, 2.03 million
3. Higher education, 1.95 million
4. Computer Software, 1.65 million
5. Telecommunications, 1.59 million.

LinkedIn’s membership continues to grow, with 172,800 new registrations every second. However, LinkedIn does not say whether these 200 million members are frequently active on the site, making it difficult to compare with Facebook’s 1 billion monthly active members.

How often are you on LinkedIn?

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Instagram Accessible To The Blind

A YouTube video has shown how a blind man can enjoy using Instagram to take photos, edit them, caption, and share the results.

Tommy Edison is blind but has been using the photo sharing app to capture images. Although he cannot see what they look like, he gets plenty of interesting comments on what he’s posted and how they look.

With the help of the “accessibility” feature on the iPhone, Edison can make Siri read out to him every button that he touches. The app itself, filters to select, and where to share the photo are all read aloud amongst other things.

The pictures can then be captioned by using speech recognition to complete the process. Instagram app availability for the visually impaired is just one example of how social media is expanding to be accessible for everyone.

Tommy Edison also has a YouTube channel where he discusses “the fun parts of being blind” as well as performing other general day to day actions.

This is one of many apps that are accessible to blind people with one app using data from Foursquare to help those who are visually impaired the find their way around the streets.

Tommy Edison’s Instagram profile can be found at blindfilmcritic.



What do you think of apps and social media being accessible for the visually impaired?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below

Facebook Adds Voice Messaging to Its Messenger App

Facebook added the ability to send voice messages to its Messenger app for iOS and Android Thursday.
To send a voice message, tap the + button beside where you traditionally type a message in the Messenger app. Then select Record, holding the button down to speak. When you release the Record button, your voice message will be sent to your recipient.

Along with today's update, Facebook has also started testing VoIP functionality in Canada. iPhone users in the country can try the feature by tapping the "I" button in the top right corner of a conversation with a person they would like to call, and then tapping Free Call.

Important to note: While free to use, these VoIP calls will use your existing data plan, which could get pricey if you use the feature often.
Messenger is one of several stand-alone apps developed by Facebook. The company often uses the apps to test new features with power users before deciding which features to include in the traditional Facebook app for the social network's general audience.

Late last month Facebook released a new stand-alone app called Poke, which allows users to send short photo, text, or video messages to Facebook friends. Messages sent via Poke expire after a certain period of time (one to 10 seconds).

Will you use Messenger for voice messaging with friends? Let us know in the comments what you think about the new feature.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, akinbostanci