Over fifty million users entrust their professional identities and relationships with LinkedIn, helping build LinkedIn into the largest global professional network today. However, professionals around the world use a wide variety of applications and Web sites to get their work done, and they have spoken loud and clear that they want the ability to leverage their professional networks wherever they work.
Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. Developer.linkedin.com is now live and open for business.
The evolution of the LinkedIn Platform
Over the past months, LinkedIn has supported integrations with some of the most prominent and critical software applications in the enterprise. Partnerships with companies like IBM, Blackberry (Research in Motion), and most recently Microsoft, have given us time to invest in both functionality and scalability of the platform.
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oftware is moving to the cloud, and business applications need context for who people are and how they are related. LinkedIn now is the obvious choice as a provider for those services. It is hard to imagine a business application that would not benefit from LinkedIn integration.”
– Roger Neal, SVP/GM at BusinessWeek Digital, McGraw-Hill
At LinkedIn, we have always believed that business applications are better when they are built over a platform of professional reputation and relationships. In real life, our most valuable professional assets are the skills and experience we acquire and the trusted relationships we build. It’s not surprising that business software becomes more productive and valuable when it is built over these services.
How can I start developing for the LinkedIn Platform today?
Registering as a LinkedIn developer is as simple as filling out a form on developer.linkedin.com. The LinkedIn platform leverages the open OAuth standard to make integrations from almost any language and development environment as simple as possible.
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hat a breath of fresh air. We were able to go to http://developer.linkedin.com, request a key, and actually write functioning code in less than 15 minutes. It’s amazing to have access to such a powerful platform on tap at any time.”
A number of developers who have helped provide us with feedback and guidance in our development will be announcing integrations in the coming weeks. For example, TweetDeck is announcing full support for the LinkedIn platform in its next version. Now you can easily view or take action on your LinkedIn network updates from within TweetDeck, with the full integration of the LinkedIn profile information of the person who posted the update.
This is the beginning of a new set of opportunities for the LinkedIn platform, and we look forward to seeing the integrations that developers will launch in the coming weeks and months.
Stay tuned for additional enhancements over during the coming months as we learn and grow this platform together.
Today, Microsoft announces an exciting new addition to the upcoming Microsoft Office 2010 – the Outlook Social Connector. The Outlook Social Connector is designed to seamlessly bring communications history as well as business and social networking feeds into your Outlook experience.
LinkedIn will be the first networking site to support the Outlook Social Connector. The LinkedIn functionality will be available in early 2010. Our big belief is that you can be much more effective if you have your professional network close at hand, and you can leverage your online identity in the work you do on a daily basis. The Outlook Social Connector will bring your LinkedIn Professional Network to where you work – right within your e-mail inbox.
Here are three key benefits you get from this integration:
1. Keep up with LinkedIn connections right from your e-mail inbox
One of the great things about LinkedIn is being able to learn what your professional connections are working on and thinking about. Just glance at the Network Updates on your LinkedIn homepage and you’ll be able to learn what articles & books your connections are reading, what conferences they are attending, and what questions they are asking and answering on LinkedIn. Many use this information to keep current with their industry and profession, as well as to learn new things and expand their horizons.
The Outlooks Social Connector makes this even easier – by automatically showing the latest activity (i.e. Network Updates) from any LinkedIn connection that sends you an e-mail. So now you can get the latest information from your LinkedIn network even without having to leave your inbox.
What’s more, for any connection with a public LinkedIn profile photo, you’ll even get to see their picture as you communicate.
2. E-mail your LinkedIn connections directly from Outlook
Know that perfect LinkedIn connection to help you with a business task or question but don’t remember their current email address? No longer do you have to go to the LinkedIn website to find their contact information before sending them a message, as your LinkedIn network is now available right within your inbox. Just start typing the name of a LinkedIn connection in the “To:” field of an Outlook message and the connections’ e-mail address from LinkedIn will automatically appear as if they are an existing Outlook contact. In fact, the Outlook Social Connector will create an Outlook Contacts folder for all of your LinkedIn connections and bring down their contact information, professional details, and picture from LinkedIn into Outlook.
3. Keep building your professional network from Outlook
Working with someone new but haven’t had a chance to connect with them on LinkedIn? By bringing professional networking to where you work, the Outlook Social Connector again makes it easy. Just click a button next to any e-mail you receive and instantly send an invitation to connect to the e-mail’s sender. It’s that easy.
We hope that these functions start bringing some of the key elements of your LinkedIn professional network to where you work – your Outlook e-mail inbox, sometime early next year. But these are certainly just the first steps. Let us know what else you’d like to see by leaving a comment below.
Today we’re announcing a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter – and new features that we think are going to make both Twitter and LinkedIn more powerful for you.
The idea is simple: When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool.
Why? Because when you’re trying to get something done, you want Twitter and LinkedIn to work together. Like peanut butter and chocolate! Or at least that’s what Biz and Reid think:
LinkedIn has always been about helping you to build your professional identity on the web. The many elements that make up your online professional brand range from your LinkedIn profile to the many professional conversations you’re a part of. Status has proved valuable to our users, from finding new assignments and jobs to kick-starting a global business enterprise.
Now you can amplify those messages by broadcasting them to your audience on Twitter.
How does LinkedIn work with Twitter?
The feature is now available to all of our users, and with today’s launch, we’re making that two-way communication between your status updates and tweets a breeze to set up. Here’s how it works:
1. On LinkedIn
Want to share some interesting ideas about an industry-specific article you’ve just read with an even broader audience? Or how about letting people view your Twitter account name on your LinkedIn profile? Begin by joining your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts in just a few clicks. All you need to do is check the Twitter box under your Network Updates box on the homepage and follow a few simple steps.
Syncing your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts
Clicking through the setup process will allow you to specify the Twitter account that you’d like to sync and/or display on your LinkedIn profile.
Display Twitter on your LinkedIn profile
2. On Twitter
As a professional online and in the real world, you’ll often find articles or think of ideas that would be useful to share with your Twitter followers and your LinkedIn connections. It’s about sparking interesting conversations. Now you can share from anywhere. As part of the setup process, you can choose to either send all your tweets or select tweets from Twitter back to LinkedIn as a status update.
Share tweets as your LinkedIn status
If you pick the latter, don’t forget to add the #li or #in hashtag to every relevant tweet you’d like to send back to LinkedIn. Here’s a good example:
Include #in with any tweet to post as your LinkedIn status
So go ahead and get started. Link your LinkedIn and Twitter accounts today to add a new dimension to your professional conversation.
A couple days ago, we launched several new features aimed at enhancing the professional conversation in LinkedIn groups. We call one of those features “following”.
Following makes it easier for you to see contributions made by your connections and other people you value within your groups. To get you started, you’re already following all of your connections and they’re following you. But it doesn’t stop with your connections: to follow someone who is not a connection, just click “Follow Their Name” under their name on a discussion page or on the Member page in your group.
Now when you go to your My Groups page, you’ll see updates about what the specific people you’re following have contributed to the groups you share. Updates from the people you’re following (and your updates to the people who are following you) also appear on the Overview page of each group you share. All of this makes it faster and easier to interact with your own personal “group within the group.”
For more information about Following, check out our FAQ.
Some of you may have noticed a new site navigation experience on LinkedIn. We are in the process of testing a new design. During this testing phase, some users will see the new design, while others will not.
What’s New
A global navigation bar at the top of the page that provides convenient access to all LinkedIn services.
Simplified local navigation within each of the LinkedIn areas (Profile, Contacts, Groups, etc.).
More room available for page content. Less scrolling.
A cleaner, less-cluttered look.
An easier way to navigate and find information on LinkedIn
We began the redesign effort several months ago by analyzing how people use LinkedIn. We looked at what features people use the most and pored over several years of data from usability research on the site. Armed with this information we began doing design explorations of how to better organize LinkedIn features, and make them more convenient to find and use.
We factored into this effort additional features we knew were coming. We narrowed down the designs to a few candidates we felt were strong contenders. We then prototyped these designs and had users perform tasks with the prototypes in the usability lab. We went through numerous iterations until we arrived at a design we felt worked the best. One of the key features of the new design is that it allows much more space for page content – information about you and your professional network.
We are now doing limited testing of the new design. We are still iterating and would love to hear your feedback! Please consider this blog post one of the many ways to let us know what you think.
Feel free to either leave a comment at the bottom of the page or @linkedin us on twitter as well.
Editor’s note: This blog post is authored by Andrew He, a Stanford student currently completing his Master of Sciences degree in Computer Science. Andrew is a two-time LinkedIn intern, and spent the summer of 2009 focused on the LinkedIn mobile platform.
I suppose this blog post could have been entitled: “What I did on my summer vacation.” Truth be told, I’m just thrilled to see LinkedIn for iPhone v1.5 in the iTunes app store. There’s nothing more gratifying as a developer than to see your work go live.
This past summer, I was able to dedicate myself to enhancing the LinkedIn mobile platform. In the Fall of 2008, I was lucky enough to be one of the first students to take the new CS 193P: iPhone Application Development course at Stanford. I was looking for the opportunity to put that work to good use, and LinkedIn was excited to have me join the mobile team for the summer.
LinkedIn for iPhone v1.5 adds a large number of caching and performance improvements to the original LinkedIn application. For most people, however, the most noticeable change will be the addition of a single new module: Inbox.
The Inbox offers quick and easy access to three key features: Invitations, Messages & Sent Items. The Invitations tab shows you all of your pending invitations, making it easy to quickly accept requests anywhere. The user interface includes the image of the inviter (if available), which makes it that much easier to recognize them. The badge shows you quickly how many pending invitations you have outstanding.
The application also lets you send invitations, either by entering their email address, or by going to their profile and clicking the invitation button.
The messages tab offers quick access to all of of your outstanding messages from your connections. The badge on the tab shows you how many unread messages you have. We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to get through your messages by replying or archiving each item. You can also send a message to any of your LinkedIn connections.
Most internships at high tech startups involve new technologies and cool products. But it’s not everyday that you get to ship a real product like this with the potential to benefit millions of users.
I just want to say a quick thank you to Adam Nash, Jaikumar Ramanathan, and the entire LinkedIn mobile team. There are a lot of exciting improvements to the LinkedIn mobile platform on the way, but for now, I hope the addition of the Inbox will make the LinkedIn iPhone application an even more essential tool for mobile professionals.
If you’re interested in helping us with feedback and suggestions for future versions of the LinkedIn for iPhone application, come join us on the official LinkedIn group.
Download the latest version (v1.5) of LinkedIn’s iPhone app here
I often come across interesting profiles on LinkedIn, but I’ve found it challenging to save profiles so I can easily come back to them later. Usually, I resort to bookmarking the profiles in my web browser or scribbling down names on a piece of paper.
Today we are launching Profile Organizer, a new Premium feature that lets you save profiles, organize them into folders, and add notes. Anytime you find an interesting profile, simply click “Save Profile” and the profile is bookmarked for you within LinkedIn.
When you click “Save Profile”, the profile is added to your Profile Organizer. You now see a module on the profile page from which you can save a profile into a designated folder, add contact information, and private notes that are visible only to you. It’s a great way to remember relevant details about contacts, and develop your relationships.
The Profile Organizer is a workspace accessible through the Contacts tab, where you can manage all of your saved profiles organized into specific folders.
Profile Organizer also lets you save profiles directly from the search results page. With just one click, you can save a profile and add it to a folder directly from search.
If you do many searches on LinkedIn, the single-click “save profile” action can save you time. You no longer need to review each interesting profile in detail: just save from the search results page, and you can narrow down your list in Profile Organizer later.
A few of us at LinkedIn have started using Profile Organizer and find it particularly helpful after attending networking events or conferences. In the past, I collected a stack of business cards and came back from the event unsure about what to do with them. Now, I find the contacts on LinkedIn, and jot down relevant information into Profile Organizer. The next time I go to a similar event, I simply glance through my notes to recall details about our past conversations.
If you have a minute, check out this short feature demo:
Get started using the new feature by clicking on the “Save Profile” link from any LinkedIn profile or search results. Alternatively, you can also check out your Profile Organizer page here.
Profile Organizer is a Premium Account feature, but we are offering a 30-day free trial for all of our members to try it out. Learn more here. We’d love to hear your questions and / or feedback at feedback@linkedin.com. Or follow us @linkedin.
I’m happy to report that as of today, as part of Palm webOS 1.2, the most common feature request from LinkedIn members has now been delivered: seamless syncing of your LinkedIn connections to your Palm Pre, via Palm Synergy. Now every application on the Palm Pre can benefit from the information provided by your LinkedIn network.
The process is incredibly simple:
Make sure that you have received the new webOS 1.2 over-the-air update on your Palm Pre. LinkedIn is only available with Palm webOS 1.2 or later.
Click the “Contacts” application
Select “Preferences & Accounts” from the menu
Click “Add An Account”
Select LinkedIn, and enter your LinkedIn email address and password.
That’s it. You’ll find your address book, available to all applications, is now sync’ed daily with your LinkedIn connections. The following fields will be automatically updated with every connection:
Email address
Title
Company
Photo
In addition to integration with Palm webOS, we’re also pleased to announce that we’ve uploaded the v1.0 of our LinkedIn for Palm Pre application. It features a number of performance improvements, and offers an improved user experience for search, the number one feature for mobile professionals. Now there is even less excuse to walk into a meeting without taking 30 seconds to type in their name and get the full detail about their professional experience.
We appreciate the feedback that you’ve given us on our first Palm Pre application, and we hope you enjoy these improvements. Stay tuned, we’re planning to roll out additional LinkedIn mobile enhancements in the near future.
Ed Brill is the Director of Product Management for Lotus Notes at IBM. He is also a blogger and frequent traveler who loves the integration of TripIt with his LinkedIn Profile. Today’s post is about how IBM is mashing up all of those tools to help make people like Ed more productive.
Millions of business professionals around the world enhance their daily productivity through their use of IBM Lotus Notes. When we delivered Lotus Notes 8, a key objective was to provide a “desktop of the future” — one that could integrate all of the content and information people need to be productive in a single client. Instantly, developers all over the world were building widgets, plug-ins, and extensions to tie together corporate collaboration and user-customized information and content.
This week, IBM and LinkedIn are announcing the availability of the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes. This easy to use add-in dynamically displays LinkedIn profile, status, and other information in the Notes 8 sidebar. The new plug-in is a great example of “contextual collaboration” — where users access relevant information without having to leave behind what they are already working on.
I am excited about the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes. It provides a much greater sense of collaboration and connection to the people I interact with every day by instantly increasing my knowledge about the author of e-mails and other content. It leads to interesting discoveries of background, interests, projects, or education. The benefits in improved relationships make this a must-have for Lotus Notes users, and a good reason for you to check out Notes if you’re not already using it.
Hi everyone. My name is Nico Posner, and I am the product manager responsible for our international sites here at LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a global network of over 42 million professionals from every country around the world, with approximately half of our member base outside the United States. Our mission at LinkedIn is to connect the world’s professionals, and we would like to do this in as many languages as possible. A frequent request from our members is to offer the LinkedIn website in their native language. Today, the LinkedIn website is available in four languages: English, Spanish, French and German (we allow users to offer their profiles in over 40 languages), but we’d like to extend that to as many professionals as possible around the globe by offering additional languages.
Currently, we are investigating the best way to translate our site into more languages. Since this is a decision that will impact millions of our users, we wanted to hear from our members on what they thought were some of the most effective ways to make this happen. Fortunately, some of the best professional experts in this area are members of the LinkedIn community, so we were able to leverage their insights through a direct survey. The chart below outlines the responses we got from over 12,000 professionals this past week.
We are happy to see that thousands of members expressed an interest in contributing to the translation of LinkedIn. More importantly, this survey gives us a deeper understanding of what would be of value to the members who expressed interest in bringing LinkedIn into additional languages. These options typify some of the value propositions that members often get from LinkedIn, and we were interested in hearing which ones would be of most interest. You can see the range of responses above. Premium subscription was the most popular choice, followed by recognition on a member’s profile. Requests for direct compensation was the most common response under the “Other” category.
Our survey shows that one of the most important benefits of a community translation effort on LinkedIn would be that a member’s contributions could be highlighted directly on their professional profile. Numerous professionals demonstrate their expertise on LinkedIn every day as a means of enhancing their professional reputation. This effort could extend those benefits to members who work in the translation and localization industry.
We are still in the process of evaluating different options for translating the site into additional languages. Thank you to all of the members who’ve taken time to offer us your valuable feedback.
We love to hear from you. So feel free to comment, but keep in mind the basics of blog etiquette — no spam, no profanity, no slander, etc. All comments are moderated.
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Today we’re announcing a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter – and new features that we think are going to make both Twitter and LinkedIn more powerful for you. 
Editor’s note: This blog post is authored by 
