It looks like LinkedIn is working hard to make up for the delay in their development over the past years. Soon a new redesign will be available and yesterday LinkedIn announced they will offer Twitter integration. For a long time LinkedIn has been already providing a Twitter and Facebook alike status update, but it turned out that hardly anybody is using it. Gradually the new service will become available in the upcoming days. [Updated after the functionality appeared in my profile]

The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections, from any Twitter service or tool. For more information see LinkedIn works together with Twitter, and vice versa.

LinkedIn presumes especially Twitter users would like the two to work together like peanut butter and chocolate! Or at least that’s what Biz and Reid think. Coincidentally peanut butter with chocolate is one of my favorites and that’s why I want to know more. In the movie below, LinkedIn Co-founder Reid Hoffman and Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone discuss the potential of the integration between their companies.

Easy to use integration

The new feature is rather easy to use. When you visit you status update bar within LinkedIn you will find a new Twitter checkbox like in the image below. Write your update and check this Twitter box.

You will be requested what Twitter account you would like to connect and whether you want all your Twitter messages to show up as your LinkedIn update. You can choose to limit this to a selected amount of Tweets. To achieve this you will have to include the tag #in into your Tweets. That’s something I might forget about …..

I am curious whether this new feature is really what LinkedIn users are waiting for. I wanted to give it a try, but the feature is not yet available. Soon we will now more. I invite you to share your experiences below.