The credit crunch. It might be bad news for investors, the housing industry, the government, tax payers and home owners - but LinkedIn would like us to know that they are doing rather well as a result of international economic meltdown. Every cloud.
The number of users from the investment banking industry have doubled in the past 7 weeks, as have the number of users who listed themselves in the financial sector. Activity among users in the financial sector - basically tarting up their LinkedIn CVs in the hope of getting a new job - has increased by 50% in the past fortnight.
Page views, recommendations and invitations have all increased in the past two weeks - by 9%, 14% and 10% respectively - and the number of 'connections', or successful friend requests, has risen 21%.
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None of this is surprising; profile pimping has been a sign for several years now that someone is looking to move jobs. It is a testament to LinkedIn, of course, that the site is becoming that engrained in people's professional lives. They will just have to hope that high-flying business types are less fickle that Facebook's audience when it comes to moving on to the next big shiny social networking site.
And what's the overall picture for the tech industry as a result of the credit crunch? Om Malik has stories of tech firms painting a surprisingly positive outlook (Cisco has $26bn in the bank, for example) despite lay offs (360 at Nvidia) and a gloomy outlook for clean tech firms.
TechCrunch, meanwhile, says investment in startups are ploughing on there will eventually be a trickle down.
"As investors suffer large losses elsewhere, they are not able to fulfill their commitments to the venture funds. This will hurt small funds first, which may already be scrounging for new limited partners to replace the money from existing investors who are beginning to come up empty-handed. Less money for VCs would mean less money for startups."
