LinkedIn, the business-oriented service for professionals, announced a home page redesign and new features available for its users. For the time being, the site offers a beta page to the registered users, who will get an early preview on the site’s new appearance, but the new LinkedIn will have its official debut in early 2008. The site’s newest feature will be LinkedIn news, having as an inaugural partner Business Week.  Future partnerships have not been announced, but according to the vice-president and co-founder of LinkedIn Allen Blue, they will be most selective in choosing them.

 “LinkedIn focused on enhancing the productivity of the professional world. With that in mind, we will only work with select business partners who have already built high value, high productivity applications” said Blue, according to InternetNews.com.

Among the elements of the new LinkedIn site will be a series of useful widgets and a LinkedIn Answers feature that will allow users to ask other people in the network questions, similar to Google Answers or Yahoo Answers.

The Intelligent Applications Platform - called “InApps” – announced simultaneously to the site’s redesign, will integrate its features into outside developers’ sites, allowing them to create software for LinkedIn. As a partner in Google’s OpenSocial network, LinkedIn’s representatives have said that InApps structure will include “the ability to develop applications that will run within LinkedIn using the OpenSocial development model.”

According to a statement made by LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye, “the goal of the Intelligent Applications Platform is to help make our users more effective by providing them with access to the intelligence of their professional network both on LinkedIn and on other sites they visit to get work done. Our focus is 100 percent professional, so we will be working with select partners to build high value, high productivity applications.”