Dieting and exercising suck. You are not going to have fun. The science is simple: eat fewer calories than your burn. Start quantifying. I use FitDay to track calories. Run a 1,000 calorie per day deficit. Go easy on the drinking. Take up smoking — a zero-calorie alternative. Eat one serving. Drink more coffee, an appetite suppressant. Low-fat ice cream has around 120 calories per half cup. After two weeks, your stomach will shrink. Step two is exercise. It's awful. Use an elliptical machine. Treadmills make you run. One hour per day, hard. You should be close to vomiting. Easy, huh?

(Photo by mandj98)

Regulators frown on free communications between knowledgeable company executives and information-hungry investors. LinkedIn offers "compliance" tools, but those tools amount to letting the fox electronically monitor the henhouse. Hedgies surely realize this, and will see LinkedIn's lax policies as a selling point. (Other firms which connect investors with company insiders have, at some expense, created systems which allow the experts' employers, not just the investment firms, to monitor contacts.)

If it gets in trouble, LinkedIn will likely plea that it didn't know how its networking site was being used — the standard we're-just-a-platform dodge. But it will be hard to claim that for two reasons. First, LinkedIn is touting the account managers it's providing who will actively help traders use the service. Second, CEO Dan Nye previously worked at Advent Software, a company which provides portfolio-management software to Wall Street firms. It's not like he's unfamiliar with the SEC's disclosure and monitoring requirements. Rather, one has to think he knows just how expensive complying with those rules are, and that rejiggering LinkedIn's software to obey them will make LinkedIn Research a nonstarter.

It's not a stretch to imagine how an ambitious government prosecutor could make a case for LinkedIn aiding and abetting insider trading. The law doesn't even require that money change hands; exchanging inside information for a thumbs-up reference on LinkedIn could very well qualify as a breach of the rules.

But that assumes anyone in Washington or New York is paying attention. Unlikely, given the mortgage mess. LinkedIn will likely go public on the basis of its hedge fund-juiced revenues long before an overtaxed SEC gets around to looking at how, exactly, the avaricious traders of Greenwich are getting their information.

1. Mozilla
2. Facebook
3. Mahalo
4. DoubleClick
5. Yahoo
6. Microsoft
7. Google
8. LinkedIn
9. Jajah
10. Adobe

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

• Tech's 10 worst workspaces
• Yahoo
• Mozilla
• Mahalo
• Google
• Microsoft
• LinkedIn
• Jajah
• Facebook
• DoubleClick
• Adobe

Lacy, we hear, has a book coming out next week, full of Valley-insider secrets. But she finished writing it long ago. There's no longer any point in hoarding the gossip she gathers. Sarah, here's a suggestion: Please write a post telling us 10 other things nobody knows, but that you don't consider news. You might find it surprising that we find them surprising.

Inadmissable Advertising Pop-ups and Pop-unders Ads with non-functioning drop-down menus, radio buttons, and text boxes Ads that contain fraudulent, deceptive or misleading statements or illustrations. Attacks of personal nature Advertisements that are overly competitive or that refer abusively to the goods or services of others. Offensive to Good Taste - Indecent, vulgar, suggestive or other advertising that, in the opinion of LinkedIn, may be offensive to good taste. Discrimination Advertisements that fail to comply with the express requirements of federal and state laws. Investments Advertisements that do not comply with applicable federal, state and local laws and regulations. Political advertisements that do not identify the paid sponsor in every frame of the ad will not be accepted. Tobacco Advertisements for cigarettes and other tobacco products. Occult Pursuits Advertisements for fortune telling, dream interpretations and individual horoscopes except when the emphasis is on amusement rather than serious interpretation. Endangered Species Advertisements offering furs or products made from the furs or hides of animals included on government endangered species lists. Online Gaming Advertisements promoting online gaming or wagering sites. Advertisements that, in our opinion, simulate LinkedIn.com web pages and/or other LinkedIn products or that may be confused with our web pages are unacceptable.

Be challenged at LinkedIn

We're looking for superb analytical minds of all levels to expand our small team that will build some of the most innovative products at LinkedIn.

No specific technical skills are required (we'll help you learn SQL, Python, and R). You should be extremely intelligent, have a quantitative background, and be able to learn quickly and work independently. This is the perfect job for someone who's really smart, driven, and extremely skilled at creatively solving problems. You'll learn statistics, data mining, programming, and product design, but you've gotta start with what we can't teach—intellectual sharpness and creativity.

This is a unique opportunity to help define and build a new product and engineering team within a mid-sized (230 employees), globally-recognized, energetic, ambitious, and profitable pre-IPO startup.
Projects

LinkedIn has amassed an incredible dataset, which we use to deliver highly personalized experiences for all our users. Our group also leverages our unique dataset, our creativity, and our skill with quantitative analysis to design and and build products like "people you may know", "who's viewed my profile", "jobs for you", and "company profiles". The environment here is optimized for speed—for example, within a week of the initial concept for "viewers of this profile also viewed", it was live on the site. There are many products along these lines that you can help improve, develop and invent. The work is both intellectually rewarding and delivers important value to our users. In addition, the work's varied: one week, you may be involved in predicting which ads a specific user is likely to click on (profile targeted advertising), and the next, working on a model that decides whether 'Webex, Inc' is the same as 'Webex Communications' (it isn't).
Why work at LinkedIn?

* Challenging work that matters
* LinkedIn is actually useful. Every day, people use LinkedIn to hire, find contacts, stay in touch, and manage their professional brand.
* Weekly releases mean your code will help someone find their dream job or former colleague right away
* "We tackle world-class engineering problems (of scale, performance, and security) with innovative architectural solutions" — Ruslan Belkin, Director of Engineering.

Rapidly growing business

* 21 million interconnected, elite professionals (that's more people than live in Australia)
* >1 million new users every month (that's like Fiji or Rhode Island)
* Profitable in 2007 ($75M-$100M expected in 2008)

Benefits

* Pre-IPO stock options
* 18 vacation days per year plus 8 company holidays
* Free catered lunches every day and a fully stocked kitchen
* Shuttles from San Francisco and CalTrain
* Onsite Gym
* Beautiful Mac workstations with 23" monitors
* Great colleagues to play Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Four Square with.

A manager interrupting a report's search for a job outside of linkedIN by calling his connections with prospective employers and telling them not to hire

An employee told by her manager that she needed to choose between her job and her family, or LinkedIN was not the place for her

An employee physically accosted by his manager's wife, and then fired when asking HR for help resolving the issue

Each of these things has happened at LinkedIN over the past few months; Each of the managers involved has been a recent hire, brought in by Dan Nye to manage long-time LinkedIN teams. What happened? How did LinkedIN middle management get to such a state?

He continues:

The answer is obvious: By concentrating on growth, and only growth, LinkedIN has exploded to almost three hundred employees in the last year. think about that: people who have been at linkedin less than 9 months outnumber people who have been there more than 9 months by almost two to one.

This means that LinkedIN is undergoing an identity crisis internally. Deathly afraid of looking weak, or having made the wrong decision, upper management has closed ranks, ruthlessly squashing individual contributors who rock the boat, or even question bad hiring decisions. And, lets face it, Dan Nye's hyperbole about only hiring ' the best' aside, any time a company goes on a rapid hiring binge, like LinkedIN has, there are bound to be mistakes.

But is LinkedIN cutting off its nose to spite its face by taking draconian measures to keep its employees quiet? When an operations employee warns an executive that a new director's bad technical decisions will result in an outage within the next six to eight months, should that executive investigate the issues, or tighten ranks, and dismiss the employee? Obvious, right? And yet, LinkeDIN appears to have made the wrong decision; any issue brought to HR is immediately brought to LinkedIN's legal team, who appear to be resolving the issues based on whether the complaint is feasibly actionable, and whether the employee in question can be threatened into silence. Ouch!

One thing that might explain it is that LinkedIN is attempting to coast to the end game, and is not looking beyond IPO or acquisition. Because, let's face it - rumors flying of bad technical and personnel choices hurt the bottom line. But the rank-and-file attitude at LinkedIN has changed over the past year from 'we're all in this together' to 'I need to keep my head down until the IPO'

Fortunately, LinkedIN has a good brand, one that has a lot of value. And that can make up for a lot of bad choices. But at the end of the day, will the disastrous expansion LinkedIN cause it to wobble completely out of control?

This, after the company's membership rose from 200 to 5,000 to 70,000 in a week, due mainly to a feature that allowed new users to invite their LinkedIn network to the site. LinkedIn has since closed NotchUp's access to its members and is even considering legal action, but really, the damage has already been done.

"We've had a number of inquiries from some of the best firms on Sand Hill Road," Ambras said. "I guess some of those people got some invites." Mission accomplished! More proof that spam pays.

MySpace has only added 8 million users since last year — and lost users since October. Valley darling Facebook has nearly doubled its user base, jumping from 19 million to almost 35 million users. Live Spaces and Hi5 have lost users, while Bebo and, incredibly, Friendster have added users, though they are still nowhere near the market leaders. The site with the big focus on business, LinkedIn, has more than tripled in size since last year — but shows almost no growth the past 3 months.

Leaving aside December, which is a likely outlier for engagement thanks to the holidays, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5 and LinkedIn all show growth between December 2006 and November 2007. Only MySpace and Live Spaces show a drop during that time period — a particularly ominous sign for News Corp.'s MySpace. At 196 minutes per visitor, it's still light years beyond any of the smaller sites. Friendster, which had shown strong engagement growth, up to 109 minutes in October, fell to under 70 minutes in November before plummeting to 40 minutes in December.

As Creative Capital points out, the News Corp. earning announcement next week will give the first insight into the money numbers from MySpace — and we'll know if the slowing growth is affecting the bottom line.

With LinkedIn projected to earn 2008 revenue between $75 million to $100 million, former LinkedIn exec Keith Rabois, now at Slide, told the paper Hoffman and company need to go public sooner rather than later.

"Right now, LinkedIn just doesn't seem to be at the center of the Internet universe and an IPO would be an amazing marketing opportunity," he said.

Others aren't so bullish. After CEO Dan Nye said the company would only sell for "a lot more" than $1 billion, Silicon Alley Insider guffawed, noting that career site TheLadders.com recently poached LinkedIn's former head of corporate sales, Brendon Cassidy, with ease. Would he have stayed if he believed in LinkedIn's revenue upside? That's the question the Herald should have asked Rabois.

LinkedIn will announce its own developer platform on December 10 . Friendster has already announced its own. MySpace, though it may have been hoping OpenSocial would spare it the expense of developing its own platform, is well on its way to copying all things Facebook.

In the spring of 2006, Facebook let it be known that it wouldn't consider acquisition offers under $2 billion. Most laughed it off. But come this fall, of course, Microsoft and Google fought for the privilege to set Facebook's value at $15 billion. Sure, Facebook has the numbers to back the hype, but so does LinkedIn, which actually outgrew Facebook in the past year.

Several applications will be available the day LinkedIn's platform launches. The social network also introduce several new apps of its own on that will "enable them to draw on the wisdom, knowledge, experience, resources, and inspiration of their networks."

It's not good news for Google's OpenSocial initiative, in which LinkedIn is a theoretical partner. Why would LinkedIn need its own platform — if, that is, OpenSocial were anything more than a PR scam?