LinkedIn Stays All Business with New Social Features - Building New Applications
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The LinkedIn Intelligent Application platform is described by Lucian Beebe, director of product management, in the company’s blog as enabling two things: bringing LinkedIn to a developer’s application, and bringing a developer’s application to LinkedIn. That’s not actually as confusing as it sounds. What Beebe means by bringing LinkedIn to a developer’s application is that developers can integrate LinkedIn information from a user’s network (with the user’s permission) into their applications.
Bringing a developer’s application to LinkedIn, of course, is pretty straightforward; it simply means that programmers will be able to write applications that run inside LinkedIn.com. It’s LinkedIn’s support for OpenSocial that makes this possible right now, but the company intends to “add other models in the future,” according to Beebe.
LinkedIn has already announced a partnership with Business Week concerning this platform. Business Week built an application that pulls information from a LinkedIn user’s network (when the user authorizes it to do so) to enhance their viewing of Business Week’s content. So when a member of LinkedIn is reading a story about, for example, Apple, the application will look at the member’s profile and highlight the names of people they know at Apple.
It’s worth noting that LinkedIn wants to maintain its focus on being a network for business professionals while it phases this in. Beebe explicitly points out that “to leverage this distribution engine, you have to have a business productivity application…LinkedIn will remain focused on improving the productivity of people doing business and we’ll work with people fitting that standard.” So no applications that let you “bite” others on the network here!
On the other hand, that still leaves plenty of room for some very useful widgets. Imagine you’re putting together a business conference. Wouldn’t it be nice to offer those who register for the conference some way to find out who else in their network is going – or to recommend the conference to others in their network?
Taking it one step further, how about building a widget that could tell users how popular a particular conference is among those in their network? I could see someone making money from this widget by charging conferences a nominal fee to be listed. It would be a great way to get the right information where it can be useful. After all, sometimes it helps to be able to access information about your social network when you’re not actually on your social network site. “It’s become clear that there is a very strong need to let LinkedIn users take their network with them as they use the Web to be more productive,” wrote Beebe in his post. Or, in three simple words: LinkedIn gets it.
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