(Fortune) -- Nothing can spoil a website's success faster than its own growing pains.
A new management team at LinkedIn, charged with jump-starting growth at the company, arrived in December 2008 to find the service slow, cluttered, and running on technology that shuddered under the weight of its users.
Their first mission was to rebuild the technology to scale up quickly without crashing. "When you launch a rocket, if you're off by inches in your trajectory, you'll be off by miles in space," says CEO Jeff Weiner.
For a brief period, the company stopped developing anything new and focused on updating its servers and fixing the algorithms to deliver better performance. Now the site goes down less often, pages load 60% faster, and recommendations to users are more relevant.
The next phase is developing the technology to turn LinkedIn's vast trove of profile information into useful tools.
Example: Click on a company name -- say, MTV Networks -- and you'll arrive at a landing page that lists the current and former employees to whom you are most closely connected. You'll see statistics like the rankings of the largest feeder schools and stepping-stone companies.
This business intelligence could show LinkedIn's users the best career path to follow. "Imagine you want to be a comptroller and you're trying to decide whether to return to school," VP of products Dipchand Nishar explains.
LinkedIn has the single biggest public database of résumés belonging to comptrollers. With a well-tuned algorithm, the site could eventually tell you the best way to land the job based on what everyone else did to get there.
Back to How LinkedIn will fire up your career 
| Company | Price | Change | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bank of America Corp... | 13.20 | -0.01 | -0.08% |
| Intel Corp | 23.68 | -0.37 | -1.52% |
| Hewlett-Packard Co | 24.29 | -0.57 | -2.29% |
| Microsoft Corp | 34.21 | 0.06 | 0.18% |
| General Electric Co | 23.54 | -0.12 | -0.49% |
| Index | Last | Change | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dow | 15,269.97 | -24.53 | -0.16% |
| Nasdaq | 3,449.43 | -9.99 | -0.29% |
| S&P 500 | 1,645.57 | -4.94 | -0.30% |
| Treasuries | 2.01 | -0.01 | -0.59% |
|
The fuss over Apple's complex strategies to avoid taxes put the corporate tax code on display in all its convoluted glory this week. More |
The 79 tornadoes that hit over three days in 10 states caused billions in losses, with most of damage concentrated in Moore, Oklahoma. More |
Users are flocking to a new email program. More |
Vermont, a patent-rich state, is cracking down on so-called "patent trolling," a growing problem for entrepreneurs nationwide. More |
When you make a donation, every penny isn't going to the victims you're hoping to help - charities take a chunk of your donations for administrative costs as well. More |
.
