(Photo: LinkedIn Blog)

LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, has decided to ban prostitution, the world's oldest profession. In an update to its privacy policy and user agreement, spotted by ReadWriteWeb, LinkedIn specifically calls out sex workers and asks them to please stop advertising their wares on the site.

When you use LinkedIn, you must agree not to:

i. Even if it is legal where you are located, create profiles or provide content that promotes escort services or prostitution.

As RWW notes, you can even endorse people for prostitution as a skill. It's grouped in with other various illegal activities, like extortion, manslaughter and drug trafficking, which generally point to people who work at nonprofits related to those areas, and not those who have committed them. (That's what MySpace is for.)

It's unsurprising that LinkedIn would seek to outlaw those who offer illegal services from using its platform--when was the last time you saw "Drug Dealer" listed as someone's profession on the site? Plus, LinkedIn needs to avoid becoming the reincarnation of sleazy backpages if it wants to keep that stock up. But some countries--and even some U.S. states, like Nevada--have legalized prostitution.

Guess sex workers will be forced to stick to Craigslist to boast their services.

Umm. (Photo: Flickr)

Looks like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman is just using any excuse to get shitfaced. In honor of the company's tenth birthday, he created “Cinco de LinkedIn,” a real company event celebrated by its 3,700 employees.

Not only does it sound moderately offensive, like drunk-sorority-girl-loudly-practicing-her-Spanish-at-Blockheads obnoxious, but it is also numerically nonsensical. At last check, cinco is roughly translated to "five" and not "terrible fucking idea."

Mr. Hoffman, in his own words:

None of this would be possible without all of our LinkedIn employees, past and present, who’ve poured their passion and talents into building this company. In 2003, we were a handful of guys in a living room. Today, 3,700+ employees are celebrating “Cinco de LinkedIn” around the world.

And, perhaps worst of all, if the company's Flickr is to be believed, the party was held on a Sunday. Granted that is the actual day of Cinco de Mayo, but being forced to talk about endorsements and what Mashable stories are going be featured in the LinkedIn Today newsletter on a weekend sounds muy horribles.

We're scared to see how Mr. Hoffman forces his employees to celebrate Bastille Day.

Scenic, boring West Virginia. (Photo: Flickr/tobyotter

As predicted, LinkedIn has shelled out $90 million for the mobile news aggregation startup Pulse. [AllThingsD]

Facebook is still the biggest social network for teens but they're getting, like, so totally bored with it. Ditto YouTube. [Business Insider]

People who believe they're "electrosensitive" are moving to a small town in West Virginia to escape Wi-Fi and cell phone service and other such rays. [Slate]

“Because people broadcast their lives on Facebook and Twitter and Vine, there’s a notion that everything that happens is going to be shared.” Social media is helping convince people they need to film their wedding proposals. [Forward]

Bitcoin has dropped 77 percent in two days. Hope everyone's learned their lesson. [Business Insider]

Twitter is reportedly launching its music service sometime either today or this weekend, to coincide with--sigh, of course--Coachella. [AllThingsD]

(Photo: flickr.com/sheilascarborough)

Are you inordinately proud of your thousands of LinkedIn followers? Well, you might want to sit down because here comes a bracing assault on your sense of achievement.

The Daily Dot reports that the sad tale of Linda Eagle, who was discharged from her position as CEO then locked out of her LinkedIn account and replaced by her successor, has come to its sorry conclusion: Her employer had no right to her account, but she's not getting any compensation for the affront.

Too bad, so sad!

Ms. Eagle has spent the last couple of years pestering the court for damages, claiming she lost income since she couldn't access her network. Unfortunately, it seems she is, as they say in the legal business, shit out of luck. The Daily Dot reports that the presiding judge told her:

“I have immense difficulty finding that you sustained any damages as a result of this,”

And that, my friends, is why you should still collect business cards at conferences.

IBM is making a push into mobile, and plans to provide customers with software, data and security services on mobile devices. [NYT]

Calling all youth correspondents: the social network Pheed is said to be gaining in popularity, especially with teens. [Forbes]

Facebook isn't the only tech company to catch heat for using stock option deductions to avoid paying corporate taxes. The Center for Tax Justice says LinkedIn has used the deduction to avoid paying federal taxes for the last three years. [New York Post]

Eduardo Saverin talked about life after the Facebook, the challenges faces the social media company he helped found, and his decision to move to Singapore. "No, I did not rescind my citizenship for tax purposes," is what he says. [WSJ]

"I can't repeat this often enough ..." (Photo: Wikipedia)

We've never paid particularly close attention to LinkedIn's "Influencer" feature, which lets average Joe Job Hunter follow the public profiles of so-called Thought Leaders, mostly politicians and executives who use LinkedIn as a platform to share business insights.

Sure, we can understand why a business leader might choose the professionalized audience at LinkedIn over, say, Facebook, as a place to share his or her thoughts. But despite repeated mention by LinkedIn executives of Mr. Branson's 1.2 million followers during last week's quarterly earnings call, we can't say we've been paying much attention. Until now.

That's because this morning, we received an email from the company, suggesting we read an update by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who apparently logged onto LinkedIn last week to pen a post titled "My Colonoscopy."

It's a brief PSA peppered with graphic descriptions of Mr. Cuban's pre-colonoscopy fears ("the thought of being violated by a long tube is at the very bottom of the list of things I want to do on a summer day"), the unexpected joys of the experience ("No where else can you rip off some huge farts and have three nurses and a doctor, while maintaining a very professional demeanor, tell you that you aren’t done yet and demand that you let loose a few more") and a light scolding that "your life just might depend on getting tested for colon cancer."

Let's set aside for a moment that Mr. Cuban is right the importance of getting checked; also, that LinkedIn seems like an odd place to share these thoughts. What's most bizarre about Mr. Cuban's LinkedIn post is that it appears to be a word-for-word copy of a 2007 entry on Mr. Cuban's blog. (Well, it appears that Mr. Cuban deleted an emoticon for the benefit of LinkedIn's professional network.)

Which begs the question: What the hell is going on? Last week, a clever LinkedIn marketing hand figured out a way to get users to tweet about the company. Which gives us to wonder whether Mr. Cuban was simply reminding his followers to get themselves checked, or if some cynic over at LinkedIn figured this was the best way to get us over to Mr. Cuban's Influencer page.

You know who. (Photo: flickr.com/prospere)

Mark Zuckerberg is on an absolute roll this week. First, he was forced to withstand abuse from scores of outraged Instagram users. Then, word escaped that Facebook is plotting the introduction of video ads (with autoplay!) into your newsfeed, inspiring at least one outraged user to threaten to flee into the waiting arms of Myspace.

And today, the company announced a new feature, currently being tested on a small group of users, that would make it easier for randos to reach you--and for you to reach randos. For a price, of course:

"Today we’re starting a small experiment to test the usefulness of economic signals [Ed note: LOL.] to determine relevance. This test will give a small number of people the option to pay to have a message routed to the Inbox rather than the Other folder of a recipient that they are not connected with."

So if you really want to track down a potential employer, you can cough up a little dough and maybe stand a better chance of your message getting noticed. Facebook hasn't specified the cost, but sources tell AllThingsD it's likely to be around a dollar.

Now, if we were paranoid, we might wonder whether this had been the purpose of the "Other" inbox all along. Although that would have required long-term strategic thinking, not exactly Facebook's strong suit. Cough, mobile, cough. Facebook argues this plan cuts down on spam, pointing out that it will only apply to personal messages. For now, they’ll limit the number of bumped messages to one per week per person.

What does that sound like? Oh, right: LinkedIn, the social network that's actually fared well since going public.

This guy: prooooobably not a CIA assassin. (Photo: LinkedIn)

Sure, being a James Bond-level spy is a glamorous job, one that most people would love to humblebrag about online. But if you're a secret agent working in international espionage, you might not want to let people know about that on LinkedIn.

Flemish daily newspaper De Standaard reports that a simple search for "State Security" on LinkedIn pulls up a crop of spies who have copped to their "secret" jobs on the social network. This is essentially the Belgian equivalent of listing your position as "Top Secret Spy at the CIA" on LinkedIn.

Sophos's NakedSecurity independently verified that some of the culprits have active LinkedIn profiles. Take Pascale, who lists her job as a senior strategic analyst at OCAM, Belgium's Coordinating Body for Threat Analysis. Oh, and previously she worked for Belgian Defence!

According to NakedSecurity, a slew of people also list their employer as the Central Intelligence Agency, though the dude claiming to be an assassin who's posing with a Ben Franklin impersonator in his picture is probably just fucking with us.

Having an active social network footprint online can be dangerous for people with ties to intelligence agencies as "those members might become the targets of sophisticated phishing attacks by adversaries who use the publicly available information on LinkedIn and other social networks to learn more about the individuals and to construct a social graph of their professional and personal contacts," writes NakedSecurity.

Also, it makes you look silly.

It's unclear whether having a social media presence--particularly for low-level, not secret jobs--is against CIA policy in the U.S, though the Belgian security agency certainly wasn't happy about the news. We've reached out to the CIA and will update when we hear back.

That wasn't all: Given the strong demand for Pandora and LinkedIn IPOs (and even stronger anticipation for the eventual Facebook offering), Spotify CEO Daniel Ek's timing for a U.S. launch seemed spot on.

Well, things have changed: Share prices for high profile tech IPOs such as Facebook, Zynga and Groupon have tanked, and as Spotify readies to close its latest round of fund-raising, the company looks likely to fall short of its goal. Instead of the $4 billion valuation that Spotify initially sought, the company will likely settle for something "slightly more than $3 billion," according to The Wall Street Journal.

But is the glass half empty, or half full? The Journal points out that for all the doom and gloom surrounding recent IPOs, tech companies are attracting high valuations:

AirBnb Inc., an online room rental site, is close to finalizing a new fundraising round expected to value the company at around $2.5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. Mobile payments company Square Inc. recently raised a new round of financing from investors including Starbucks Corp. that valued the company at $3.25 billion, other people familiar with the matter have said. Like Spotify, Square had been looking to raise as much as $4 billion, these people have said.

And even at $3 billion, Spotify is outpacing one model for large-scale digital subscription services, says Peter Kafka at All Things D:

That would be Netflix, which has some 27 million subscribers at around $8 a month. Today, after Carl Icahn goosed it a bit, Netflix has a market cap of $4.3 billion. Spotify says it has 4 million paying subscribers at around $10 a month.

So if Spotify missed its goal, its latest round of fundraising still looks bullish, and if you're looking for a reason why, you could do worse than to start with the conventional wisdom that investors have short memories.

Meanwhile, as the latest round of IPOs has shown, a lot can change in a year, and who knows what the market for tech stocks will look like if and when Spotify goes public. In light of that, it may be best to view Spotify's valuation in light of another bromide: Timing is everything.

In happier times.

There is a spectre stalking Silicon Valley, reports the Wall Street Journal. Specifically, it's the ghost of once-bright hopes for wealth-creating IPOs. Zynga, Groupon, Facebook--none of them turned out quite like everyone hoped, and it is bumming out the rank-and-file in a big way.

The worker bees have lost a lot of the paper wealth that kept them working murderous hours, says the Journal:

"Rank-and-file workers at four of the highest profile Internet companies that began selling shares in the past 16 months have collectively lost about $9 billion on paper since their initial public offerings, according to calculations by compensation researcher Equilar Inc. and The Wall Street Journal."

Fully $7.2 billion of that lost wealth evaporated from the coffers of Facebook employees. To be clear, these guys aren't one bad break away from the bread line; the Journal says the average nonexecutive employee still holds an average of $2.5 million in stock and/or stock options. However, Joe Facebook has also lost $2 million since the IPO, which has gotta sting. The average Zynga employee must be even more miserable, having started at $635,000 at the IPO and landed at $132,000. You'd be hard-pressed to afford a decent apartment in deepest Queens on that kind of money.

More importantly, it's getting harder to recruit for the next would-be superstar company:

"Why would you want to work for next to nothing at the next Facebook when the real Facebook isn't doing all that well?" said Valerie Frederickson, head of a human-resources consulting firm in Menlo Park, Calif. "People are sometimes dedicating years of their lives to something where they think there's going to be a big payoff, and then there's not."

Despite the hard times, employees aren't quite leaving in droves yet--but the Journal adds that enterprise startups are having a far easier time retaining their tech talent, rather than hemorrhaging 27-year-olds who want to work at an office where Katy Perry just stops by.

Of course, not every company has faceplanted since its IPO. Besides spamming your inbox, those lucky bastards at LinkedIn are laughing all the way to the bank. According to the Journal: "The average rank-and-file LinkedIn employee holds stock options valued at $922,000, versus $310,000 at the time of the IPO."

Who knew we'd see a day where LinkedIn employees are the resident ballers?