LinkedIn & Open Social
LinkedIn is proud to be participating in this week's launch of Open Social, a new set of open APIs to allow developers to easily build and deploy social applications across the web.
As a software developer, small company, or large corporation, you have choices of where to invest your time. How do you get the most return on the time you invest in writing code? The web brought about huge advantages in the platforms you could reach, replacing highly proprietary desktop operating systems. We all flocked to the web. Now, Google does the same with social applications.
Marc Andreessen did a great job reviewing many of the details around Open Social, so rather than replicate his words here, I'm going to just focus on what Open Social will mean for LinkedIn.
LinkedIn has a community of over 15 million professionals now, including executives from all 500 companies in the Fortune 500. We're dedicated to providing great business applications that make professionals more productive every day, and we want the broadest set of those great applications possible. Open Social provides us with a mechanism for developers of great business applications to leverage the power of the LinkedIn professional network and reach that audience, all using known web-standards of HTML & Javascript.
At LinkedIn, we’ll support business applications that fit our focus on great business applications for professionals. Got a great idea for a business application you think LinkedIn users will gain from? Open Social is a way to get it into LinkedIn and any other compatible platform you want to target. We’ll follow up with a blog posting detailing our approach and how to get involved.
LinkedIn signed up for this vision because we believe that the web architecture rewards open models. They are good for end users, good for developers, and thus good for LinkedIn.
I had the chance yesterday to spend quite a bit of time with the partners who are launching Open Social later this week - Max Levchin & Keith Rabois from Slide, Marc Andreessen from Ning, Joe Kraus from Google, Ali Partovi from iLike, Ramu Yalimanchi & Akash Garg from Hi5. It was great to see this much energy around a new open standard for social applications.
Open Social is only part of the larger story for LinkedIn about leveraging the power of your professional network, both on and off the LinkedIn site.
sumit gupta Nov 1, 2007
Adam, do you have any timeline on when will you be able to follow up detailing approach and how to get involved.
I think this is indeed a great opportunity for linkedin to steam some headlines from its rivals and reassert its dominance in the business networking space.
I personally have been in touch with Lucian on possibly working on business application together with Linkedin. With Linkedin joining OpenSocial, opportunities abound.
dov Nov 2, 2007
Do you have a timetable on when the LinkedIn OpenSocial API implementation be available for use by developers?
Arnnei Speiser Nov 2, 2007
Well done !!! I've been trying to talk LinkedIn into developing an API ever since I joined LinkedIn.
Application like LICM that had to develop their own "API" to LinkedIn information will now be able to enjoy the Open API.
LinkedIn is a specialized forum. The most important asset is the information and processes within the LinkedIn. The API will provide a way to collaborate with Added Benefit application such as the LICM, that will enhance the capabilities of making use of the LinkedIn information. These can be specialized uses. It will leave LinkedIn to take care and enhance the LinkedIn processes engine - and there is a lot to be done there.
I'm waiting anxiously for the API and hope to be part of the Beta testing ???!!!! on LICM... :-)
JibberJobber Guy Nov 2, 2007
This is great, and interesting, news! What does this mean for your previous announcement of APIs? What changes?
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
Martin Kaufmann Nov 2, 2007
Hello Adam,
Great stuff, this opens mind boggling opportunities. I posted some ideas on MLPF.
I just wonder:
- why is this blog not within LinkedIn. I only just detected it now after 2 or 3 years as a LI customer, hidden in the last corner of LI.
- why don't you give MLPF a home within LinkedIn; in fact for me it is easier to access MLPF from Facebook than from within LI.
In Xing all this type of user interaction runs withing Xing forums (the Romans also built their forum inside the city limits of Rome) ;-)
I miss innovation with LinkedIn, the only thing I have seen changing is that you added photos recently, which was since long available in Xing. If I look at the list and speed of innovations at Ning, they are moving much faster. What will we see in the near future from LI?
Martin
P.S.: please be aware that sometimes it is critical customer questions that bring innovation along.
Evert Nov 2, 2007
When can we expect the Data API's to open up on your site?
Jeff Martens Nov 2, 2007
Great news.
I'd love to see some App's that allow for web (linkedin) based integration with Outlook, integration with my other social networks, maybe a friend blog aggrigator, or a section on my profile where I can feed my Blogspot blog into.
Anshuman Nov 4, 2007
Good move Adam. While LI need not become a facebook (it should not) it can do with some more apps.
Some I can think of:
Top friends - an inner circle of sorts.
Categorise friends - top, recruiters, work, etc.
Birthdays
Question alerts (it will be great if the site could alert me that a question I answered has had more answers I can check out)
I am not a tech guy but something tells me the above might be easy to build.
Cheers for all the good work you are doing at LI.
Regards,
Anshuman
Martin Kaufmann Nov 8, 2007
we need tags to have a lot of flexibility to categorize our contacts
Vipul Kapadia Dec 5, 2007
This is really exciting to know.. could I have some idea as to when this API would be available ?
regards
Vipul
Shafiq Rehman Dec 5, 2007
Good move Adam. When you are planning to open your doors for opensocial API? We are anxiously waiting for the APIs
Didier DURAND Dec 9, 2007
Hello,
I just released a gadget named IGCheck to test the compliance of a given container with the opensocial / google gadgets APIs.
All details at http://www.toojoor.com/blog/2007/12/09/opensocial-containers-check-google-gadget-api-compliance-with-gadget-igcheck-dev-tool/
I would like to test on Plaxo: how can I proceed?
thanks by advance for your info.
didier
Perry Campanella Jan 7, 2008
Great News
I'd also a great place would be a section on my profile where I can feed my Blogspot blog into.
Andrey Golub Jan 10, 2008
x "Got a great idea for a business application you think LinkedIn users will gain from? "
Adam,
I think LinkedIn should look to integrate its pages (as QA, but probably also the profiles) with the popular today People Search Engine 2.0 Spock (spock.com), that's another great project to support OpenSocial and that moves towards the Open Social Web.
btw Spock was next to LinkedIn advised by WIRED to been watched in 2008, did you know?
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/12/YE_10_startups
I think LinkedIn as a platform and its users could greatly benefit from an easy access to all other (non business) information about the person that's a Q/A speaker or just our contact.
I see an easy URL "discover all Web Info about this person" near to people's names on LinkedIn and ... click and it's done- a pop-up is opening to show there the most important info from Spock about that person.
Like this your profile for example:
http://www.spock.com/Adam-Nash-NBuUM1lZ
could it be useful for your contacts to access all this info in one easy click, right?
LinkedIn lets us (the users) store lots of info in our profiles, all the relevant to our Professional and Business side. but in order to learn better the person we want to connect with or are already connected- it could be very useful to consult a People Search Engine if one good is available and is collaborative, right? I think Spock is very good and it's easy to integrate with it.
Hope this idea will find you well.
Kind Regards,
Andrey Golub- a Spock and LinkedIn Evangelist for Italy
http://www.spock.com/Andrey-Golub
Anders Bach Nielsen Jan 17, 2008
I am really excited about all the OS going on!
When can we expect the API to open up?
What will the guidelines for "a great idea for a business application" be like?
Looking forward to participate!
Anders Bach Nielsen
www.spotajob.dk
Steven Burda, MBA Jan 21, 2008
Looking forward to it...
Thank you, Linkedin!
~ Steven Burda, MBA
http://www.linkedin.com/in/burda
ken gavranovic Mar 21, 2008
Any updates on how we can apply for the program??
Brent Allsop Mar 21, 2008
It looks like lots of people are desperate for more information about LinkedIn’s open social plans and schedules. We would also like to know this information. Is anyone hearing more than silence about LinkedIn’s open social plans and development participation opportunities?
We at http://canonizer.com are involved with other social networking sites' development and release of this. But some of us most want to be on linked in. We believe the kind of intellectual values development and comparisons that will be possible on the Canonizer within social networks of people will fit much more in the professional linked in population. We would really like to know how our values compare with others within our linked in networks and potential new friends.
Like so many others, we at Canonizer LLC would definitely like to take you up on your offer of: “We’ll follow up with a blog posting detailing our approach and how to get involved” and be more a part of this at LinkedIn.
Looking forward to more information.
Brent Allsop
Founder Canonizer LLC