LinkedIn Stays All Business with New Social Features
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LinkedIn, the social network for business professionals, stepped out of the shadow of larger sites competing in this market with new features designed to help its nearly 17 million members get ahead in their careers. In doing so, it’s showing that there is a lot more to online networking than blogging about last night’s party and sending virtual drinks to your friends.
I freely admit that I haven’t done much on LinkedIn with my profile or on the social network in general. That’s partly because there really didn’t seem to be a lot to do on the network when I joined. I don’t always think to take advantage of business networking opportunities even when I’m face to face with someone, so using the site seemed a little “unnatural” to me. It looks like LinkedIn is trying to change that.
The company has rolled out a slew of changes since the beginning of October. Some of these are things that other social networks do as a matter of course. For example, after adding photos to LinkedIn profiles, the company added the option of letting users display their photos with all of their communication. That’s a natural thing for a dating site to do, but its importance is enhanced in a business context, as Chris Richman notes in LinkedIn’s official blog. “Imagine being able to identify whether an invitation is from someone you had a conversation with at a recent event vs. someone you don’t recognize,” he explained. With fears that social sites can help foster identity theft, this is no small consideration.
Of course, it was LinkedIn’s participation in the launch of OpenSocial that started people talking. As you probably recall, OpenSocial is a set of open APIs that allow developers to easily build and deploy social applications across the web. That participation has enabled LinkedIn to unveil a new developer platform that takes advantage of the benefits of OpenSocial. Called the LinkedIn Intelligent Application Platform, it’s a major step toward making LinkedIn more competitive and more relevant in the social networking space. LinkedIn has made some other significant changes as well: a new home page design and the addition of new modules that users can embed into their accounts. I’ll discuss each of these improvements in turn.
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