LinkedIn until very recently was a rather anodyne business networking site that had about only that, the ability to friend (by mutual permission) business contacts.

It had very little by way of - wait for it - user generated content (UGC) besides user's online resumes.

Then, a bit more than a year ago they added the questions and answer section which really upped the value of LinkedIn. The answers on LinkedIn if often very good and detailed. (I wonder why LinkedIn do not open these to the web to be indexed by search engines? But I digress.

Still, LinkedIn was lacking a bit of exposure to activity that would matter to you.

You were often not aware when one of your contacts asked or answered a question, or updated their profile. In short it needed a Personal newsfeed like Facebook had, so you could share 'in the wisdom of your crowd' as Jeff Jarvis put it.

But now it has a personal feed as well, complete with a status updating tool a la Facebook and Twitter.

And this morning I noticed a new feature. Applications!

You can add applications like Slideshare or Wordpress, that notifies your contacts via their feeds if you have updated your blog post or have uploaded a new slide show. Cool!

And cool is not a word I would have associated with LinkedIn before.