[blackbirdpie url=“https://twitter.com/LinkedIn/status/210356987576324096”]

Security Analyst today reported that as many as 6 million LinkedIn passwords have been leaked, the 161 million strong Social network focused on creating professional relationships have since confirmed the leak and have taken steps to mitigate the issues.

All compromised accounts will no longer have their old passwords working, and so the first thing you want to do is logon to your linkedin account and check if your password is still working.

A rather interesting take on Social Media courtesy of douglaswray via instagram.

Check out more cool stuff from Douglas [here]

While Facebook and Google wage holy war for the soul of the internet, the front line of the battle it seems is the login credential area. Facebook with it’s 100’s of millions of users are really making headway in this category. The premise is simple, for new and existing website designers, you can have your users log in with their Facebook credentials rather than your own unique credentials. What this means is that you as a web designer don’t need to worry about keeping a separate module for username and passwords. The extra advantage is even better, users don’t have to fill up crummy web forms to register for your website before actively participating in them. This has proven to improve the user uptake of your service, because it removes an extra step from your web design, users no longer have to register, they can do a simple 1-click login that immediately pulls data of the social network and then populates that into your website DB.

Facebook has a 5000 Friend limit, meaning you can’t have more than 5000 facebook friends, and once you hit this limit Facebook won’t let you have any more friends.

Being an excel guru, I knew that older versions of excel had a 65,536 row limit per worksheet. That meant you couldn’t store more than 65,536 rows in excel, the geeks among us would recognize 65,536 as a 2 raised to the 16th power, so the number itself suggest it’s a system limitation that prevented excel from exceeded 65,536 rows. Facebook on the other hand has a very nice round number of 5000. That suggests that is was  a very careful design consideration to limit the number of friends you have rather than some database limitation. Personally I don’t even have 1,000 friends so it’s unlikely to bother me, but it did bother quite a number of people who now have turned to fan pages to broadcast their message on facebook.

According to the LinkedIn blog, LinkedIn that ever popular ‘professional’ facebook like thingy now has more members than the population of Australia, Malaysia, Singapore combined. LinkedIn has grown to a more niche social network that proves Facebook isn’t the only kid on the block, and niche networks like LinkedIn do have a future, for instance we’re more likely to search for a job/talent via LinkedIn than via facebook, and for the most part it’s probably better to keep our social (facebook) and professional (linkedIn) lives separate.