Gen. Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Army (retired), had a really tough time after he was pushed out of the workforce. Would you like to hear about it? He would like to tell you about it. Welcome to LinkedIn's Career Curveball® confessionals!

In an attempt to broaden the shoddily-forged daisy chain of connectivity that is "what's your job" and "are you skilled," employment social media company LinkedIn announced it is doing beta testing in China. Think about talcum powder if you endorse this.

Our hate mail this week included a strongly-worded defense of Brad Paisley as well as a polite request for tame headlines. We were mistaken for Huffington Post Teen, Huffington Post College, a fitness blog, and—once again—the LinkedIn complaints department. Read below.

According to a new study at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, LinkedIn is currently the most used social media tool among the fastest-growing private companies.

Useless virtual high school career fair LinkedIn was reportedly hacked, and 6.5 million passwords leaked to a Russian hacking website. The passwords were encrypted, but hackers have apparently already cracked more than 300,000. ZDNet reports that the hack affects less than 10 percent of LinkedIn's user base, but you should probably change your LinkedIn password, after spending 20 minutes trying to remember your LinkedIn password, just in case.

Today the Wall Street Journal chatted with Nicole Williams, who is a "connection director." No, that's not what Heidi Fleiss got put in jail for. Williams works at LinkedIn, the social media equivalent of a "networking event" in a hotel conference room except without the sweaty cold cuts that bald guys are eating with their fingers.

It's a sad fact that you must join every single social network in existence or risk vanishing from the face of the earth. But this is leading to "digital fatigue" among social networkers. How to deal with this? We have the answer.

Pandora fan? The popular music service's stock was has been hit doubly hard by today's Wall Street carnage. Other recent tech IPOs LinkedIn and Zillow have likewise fallen more than the overall market. Sometimes panic has a rational side.

LinkedIn shares more than doubled in price in their first day of trading, valuing the annoyingly pointless social network at more than $8 billion. Now that the social networking bubble has reached the masses, it isn't just annoying, it's dangerous.

LinkedIn, the professional social networking site that exists only so that it can email me every two days, has taken a page from OK Cupid's book and mined its user base for meme-worthy data! First up: "The top CEO names."

LinkedIn, the social-networking service for professionals, has been blocked in China after users created a group to discuss bringing Middle East-like protests to China. People barely even use LinkedIn for its designed purpose—have you ever met a dedicated LinkedIn user?—but they're still organizing revolutions on it like crazy. Who's up for a Yelp revolution? We'll give the White House one-star reviews and say we saw a rat in the West Wing. Boom: Collapse.

It's almost the end of the year, the time when various websites mine their statistics for interesting trends. Facebook declared "HMU" the hottest word of 2010. And now LinkedIn has compiled the most overused corporate buzzwords of the year.

Welcome to the ultimate distillation of all the most evil social networking practices to have emerged over the past couple of years: Unvarnished, a website where complete strangers can set up your "profile" and mock you before potential employers.

We hear News Corporation is winding down MySpace spinoff Slingshot Labs, a vestige of the media conglomerate's efforts to retain MySpace founder Chris DeWolfe. But the labs are hatching one last diabolical plot, on behalf of the Wall Street Journal.

Endless joke/former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin has posted her resume on the middle-aged person social networking site LinkedIn. On her
LinkedIn page, Palin says she's interested in "job inquiries," "business deals," and "getting back in touch."

BusinessWeek conducted a little investigation recently and discovered that while a number of prominent CEOs have joined social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn over the past few years, very few had managed to make many friends. What about New York's population of socialites and do-nothing fameseekers? Naturally, they have no trouble making friends when it comes to Facebook. But that isn't the case with business-centric LinkedIn, where many of them lead lonely online existences and—worst of all—they've been forced to actually fill something in under the headers "job title" and "employer." How can you possibly be expected to have either if you spend your days sleeping and your evenings out at parties? A few examples—including Annabel Vartanian and Alex McCord (left)—after the jump.

• ABC and NBC will face off on Thursday night with competing tributes to Farrah Fawcett, who died today. But you probably expected that, no? [NYT]
• David Letterman beat out Conan in the ratings last week, the first time the Late Show has dominated the weekly ratings since 2005. [THR]
• Rosie O'Donnell will debut a new show on Sirius XM this fall. [NYDN]
• Rumor has it Ben Silverman's tenure at NBC may be ending soon. [DHD]
• Fox News now averages the same number of viewers as CNN, MSNBC, and HLN combined. Cue an evil grin across Roger Ailes's face. [THR]
• Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's new book contains material he ripped from Wikipedia. But he's really, really sorry about it, okay? [NYP]

Gmail has a new unsend feature — sort of like the broadcast delay in case Janet Jackson shows her nipple, but niftier because it's online! It made us think of other things people should undo.

Faith Popcorn, noted "futurist" of the early 1990s, was mainly known as one of New York's worst bosses 15 years later. As the attached job listing shows, she's maintaining that reputation.

Recessionary times should be glory days for LinkedIn, as people furiously network on the business-contacts website for scraps of work. But instead, it's LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye who finds himself out of a job.