SAN FRANCISCO - On Wednesday, LinkedIn debuted LinkedIn Signal, an overhaul to the site that puts more emphasis on the social influence of your contacts, while adding more powerful behind-the-scenes tools.

Signal was launched in an extremely private beta form at the TechCrunch Disrupt show here Wednesday, limited to just 100 new members. Signal will be rolling out slowly to members at large, executives said.

LinkedIn Signal doesn't limit users to 140 characters, as Twitter does. But it appears to put an emphasis on links to other content, with comprehensive filtering options to parse the content in several different ways.

The site's front page appears somewhat like the current LinkedIn, which also features a small window of tweets and other activity from a user's contacts. In Signal, however, that window has expanded to dominate the page, where the stream can be refined into a very narrow slice of the Web, said Esteban Kozak, the principal product manager at LinkedIn.

"Signal allows you to see everything from and about anyone," Kozak said. "You can see who is talking about what."

Instead of "trending topics," the right-hand side of Signal contains "trending links," organized by the number of times it has been shared. (It wasn't clear whether links are curated based on the number of times the link has been shared by a user's contacts or by all of the site's users.)

Users can see who shared a link, or, interestingly, what links on a given topic are being shared by employees of a given company, i.e. what Google employees think about "Yahoo" or "basketball."

Behind the scenes, the amount of research has expanded as well. On Tuesday, LinkedIn launched specific product pages for companies. When a user clicks on a LinkedIn page for Google, for example, LinkedIn Signal presents a page that can break down the number of degrees by university that its employees have and the amount of research funding the company has allocated over time. The site will also list all of the employees at a given company who are registered with LinkedIn.