We’ve written before about the growth of LinkedIn in Australia so we were interested to read about the organisations’ plans to increase the headcount in the Sydney office in The Australian newspaper today.

And as I was writing this post the below email from the fairly new MD, Clifford Rosenberg, just popped into my inbox as I imagine it will in every one of the 1 million Australian users this morning.

In addition to the appointment of Clifford Rosenberg as MD late last year, the company has also appointed a recruitment director, is looking for more staff and a media partner.

Mr Rosenberg said the decision to expand LinkedIn’s Australian operation came after a year of double-digit growth pushed its overall local audience beyond a million users.

“It’s a great starting point to set up this office and there’s a lot of exciting things we can do over here,” Mr Rosenberg said.

It is not clear how much the company plans to increase its local headcount. “I haven’t got a fixed number in mind. I’m not really at liberty to disclose our numbers by region. I don’t envisage a massive office but I do picture a group of highly motivated and enthusiastic individuals.

“We’re in a number of good discussions with telcos and media partners already, but it’s still very early days.”

You can read the full article from The Australian here.

I remember when mobile location based services were first being touted in 2000 - in the midst of the dotcom boom and getting our heads around exactly what e-commerce was, it was all so exciting and held so much promise.

It was around the same time when I believed the hype about voice recognition software and that in just a few years I’d have no use for my touchtype training all those years ago on an old typewriter (to the beats of some rather uplifting piano music no less) but instead would be having lovely realistic (an authentic Australian accent was even promised by one vendor) conversations with my laptop.

However, it seems a different story with Foursquare and its competitors. According to a report released this week by Juniper Research revenue from mobile location based services could reach US$12.7 million by 2014. An article in the Washington Post provides a good analysis of the report here.

I’m not surprised having spent the last few weeks evangelising to everyone I know (and nearly everyone I meet) about the potential of Foursquare and other similar services. While it has been around since mid last year, it was limited to select cities so unless you travelled globally, it was hard to get your head around the potential of it, but since the start of the year it can be used anywhere now.

Foursquare is basically a service you can download to your mobile phone that allows you to let everyone know where you are - it’s like Twitter for socialites.

Instead of telling everyone what  you are doing, you let your friends know where you are by ‘checking-in’ to various locations either already in the system or you can add them if you are the first to check-in there.

For those whose ears I haven’t chewed off about this topic as yet, below is a good video from the Wall Street Journal as to what Foursquare all about. And this article also from the Wall Street Journal highlights the benefits  small businesses are gaining from combining social media with their marketing.

There are literally hundreds of mobile location based services around including Gowalla, Yelp (which has had its own problems with iliciting bad reviews which we wrote about recently) and even early forerunners like Brightkite, Loopt and My Town but Foursquare is getting a lot of attention perhaps because of its quick growth - some quote it as having more than 1/2 million users already, but its also been in the news with the recent concerns over privacy and its partnership announcements with high profile brands like Bravo and Zagats.

But if people are going to worry about privacy on Foursquare they’ll be horrified to learn about another service Blibby which goes one step further and allows you to tell your friends where and what you are buying somewhere. A story in the Financial Times this week claims the service already has 10,000 users since its launch in December ‘09.

But back to Foursquare, some including Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider, say that Foursquare’s will be ousted from its ‘mayorship’ in the space if other more established and popular social networking sites like Facebook add location based services. And the introduction of Google Buzz adds another interesting element to the mix.

Nicholas also gives a nice comparison between some of the services in his article:

Yelp

• Advantages: Scale, brand, ardent community, large app install base. More money from investors like Elevation Partners.

• Disadvantages: Not your real friends. It’s a site for writers. No Foursquare-like gaming element.

Gowalla

• Advantages: Closer to mainstream than Foursquare. Has more money than Foursquare, from sexy investors like Greylock. Not based in New York so it’s closer to “real” America.

• Disadvantages: Not based in New York, which is the perfect city for this kind of software.

Facebook

• Advantages: Huge scale. Has tons of engineering talent. Like with Foursquare, Facebook friends are your real friends — the kind of people you want to join you when you go out.

• Disadvantages: Unlike Foursquare, Facebook can afford to fail. Potential rivals also include Twitter and CitySearch

Momentum is certainly growing in all these services and a lot of people are talking about it, but there are those who aren’t convinced just yet.

It seems a pretty safe bet that business will gain real benefit from these services (a lot safer than betting on my talking laptop at least), so the real issue is whose going to lead the way.

Valentine’s Day courtesy of CareerPlayer.com (which, if you haven’t seen it  / don’t know of it )  is *definitely*worth exploring.

For those of you who don’t follow the excellent Web Strategy blog written by Jeremiah Owyang from the Altimeter Group, here is a link to the matrix he has just built, comparing Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. There’s lots of great stuff in this matrix, and it gives a seriously good SWOT analysis of the four platforms today.

To be fair, I was slightly surprised to see MySpace thrown into the equation as I don’t really see the platform competing with the others, but I guess you can’t really discard 57 million users in the US alone.

Talking about Google Buzz, I’ve only just started playing with it yesterday. Although I’m looking forward to see how it develops, I must say I haven’t really been bowled over by it so far. It looks to me like lots of noise that’s difficult to classify and make sense of. A bit like Google Wave, which I couldn’t get into either. Too much hype for not much susbtance after all?

The again, very few of my contacts have joined the Buzz so far so maybe I just need a few more friends to play with it?

If you happen to have missed the massive debate around Google Buzz these last few days, you can catch up here with ReadWriteWeb’s extensive coverage and analysis.

No Apple release in recent years has avoided this classic mash-up treatment, but Hitler gets an iPad has got to be the funniest yet in view of the mega-hype ( it was front page news on every serious UK newspaper yesterday.

*Parental Warning* - there is some strong language.. Enjoy

Following up on the post on Charlene Li / , the The Havard Business Publishing interview with Groundswell co-author Josh Bernoff is also worth watching.

The interview is below, are there are some  good takeaways for organisations who are trying to socialize their operations such as identifying and addressing one core objective with stakeholders -  and building on this success to create momentum.

However, what is not covered here are the challenges of cultural / organisational change which  in our experience  are the key to really realising the value from corporate social networks.

The always incisive Jeremiah Owyang (who I met at the CSN Conference last year, where we were both speaking) left Forrester Research to join Charlene Li (who wrote Groundswell ) at Altimeter Group last year.. and as you might expect, they’re doing some really interesting stuff.

One strand at the moment is around “Socialgraphics a customer-centric approach to social strategy”.

Their presentation is below. You can track the buzz from the day (and since) with a Twitter search for the #socialgraphics hashtag.

An example Tracking Widget for VisitBritain: embed this in a blog / web page to see “realtime” social conversations about VisitBritain.

If you run a blog, have a Twitter account, use a social bookmarking tool, or indeed create content anywhere in a web 2.0 environment, Topic  clouds / Tag clouds can be a great way of visually articulating the big subjects in your life / business.

We’ve been exploring this idea for some clients, possible for Christmas cards, and one of our favourite tools is Wordle. Wordle.net

Here is a a tag cloud from the Carve blog recent posts:

Experimenting with widgets for Yell Adworks, capturing the divesity and expertise of their people via social.