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LinkedIn, the social network for business and professional networking has just raised $53m of new funding from investors, taking its total funding raised to over $80m.  Bain Capital Ventures led their latest round of funding giving investors a 5% stake.

Venture capitalists now value LinkedIn at $1bn, which following on from Facebook’s recent $15bn valuation, once again shows the confidence that VC’s have in social networking sites.

LinkedIn now has 23 million members worldwide with around 1.2 million new members joining every month. They plan to use their new funds to add features to the site and expand their service in other languages.

This week has seen hi5 become a victim of their own success, as their runaway growth has come with some some growing pains.

Over the last month, third-party developers have launched over 400 OpenSocial apps on hi5’s network. These apps have has faster adoption rates than those on any other social network. The hi5 platform has averaged at around a million application installs every day and around half of hi5’s 80 million members have engaged with three or more installed apps.

Mashable spoke to hi5 developers to find out the secrets to their success - the short version being that they just put together a really solid service and happened to quickly tap into a broad cross-section of countries. Their really impressive application statistics are continually attributed to their uniquely international userbase.

However, their success has come with some growing pains and Justin Smith at Inside Facebook has told Mashable: “Hi5 for a brief period turned off all platform notifications. However, Hi5 has since restored platform notification service to developers by making some changes to the way notifications work. Specifically, notifications are now processed asynchronously.  Hi5 will be continuing conversations with developers that are using notifications the most.”

See the full Mashable blog and hear their conversation at: http://mashable.com/2008/04/29/hi5-growth/

WOM-UK have a couple of great events coming up, which we will be attending and wanted to let you know about:

This month’s Breakfast Espresso Briefing will be hosted by Face Group, and will look at the launch of their Headbox influencer index www.headbox.com - an online collaboration community for young consumers. The event is on the 22nd April, and is just £20 for us members, or £25 for non-members - and you get your breakfast included.

WOM-UK are also holding a three day exhibition at IDFM - the International Direct Marketing Fair 08. Various WOM-UK members will be running drop-in clinics, and covering all topics relating to word of mouth marketing.

For more info on these, or other WOM-UK events, visit http://www.womuk.org/Events.aspx

As members of the IAB, myself and Benn can be found at their annual full-day conference this Wednesday: IAB Engage 2007. This year, senior representatives from AOL, Joost TV, Technorati, Proctor & Gamble, Orange and Google will also be speaking, providing their insights into how Internet marketing can engage consumers and build brands. Come along and find out how Neoco can help you use online effectively and creatively.