This past week, I was invited to and attended the Google I/O conference in nearby San Francisco. Not only did I attend some sessions covering Google technologies, but I also spoke to the developer community about LinkedIn’s OpenSocial integration.
For the inaugural year of the conference I thought Google did a good job organizing and structuring the sessions around high-level areas such as Social, Mobile, AJAX, etc. I’m a big believer in learning by doing so it was great to see the speakers incorporate example code and live demos. One of the sessions I found most interesting was about Google Guice, a dependency injection framework. It takes advantage of annotations in Java 5 to do away with all the hairy XML files those of us who use Spring are familiar with.
During my talk, I explained how LinkedIn’s OpenSocial integration is being built around Shindig, an open source implementation of the OpenSocial specification and gadgets specification. Shindig uses Google Guice for dependency injection, so attending this session was an opportunity to learn more about how Shindig is put together and whether Guice is a technology worth using in other parts of the LinkedIn architecture.
To summarize my talk (without all the marketing fluff), our philosophy at LinkedIn is a bit different when it comes to OpenSocial and social networking in general. We serve a community of professionals who want productivity apps and tools to assist in their professional lives. This is quite a bit different from other containers where entertainment and socializing are the focus of most third-party apps. Our OpenSocial Platform is built on Shindig (currently spec level 0.7) and it leverages existing LinkedIn RESTful APIs as well as supports RESTful server-to-server calls. We will have a sandbox available to partners this quarter and hope to publicly launch it next quarter.
It doesn’t look like Google has posted a video of the talk yet. In the meantime, you can checkout my slides (31-35) below.
If you want to develop an integration on your application or website, let us know here
If you want to develop an application that runs on LinkedIn, let us know here
While we already have a number of launch partners, we’re interested in selecting a few more. The main apps we’re looking for are those that extend professional profiles and those that target specific verticals. As we build experience and a world-class support infrastructure, it’s likely we’ll open our partner program to a wider audience in the future.
• Deep partnership integrations: APIs allow select partners such as APEC, SimplyHired, and IDG’s CIO.com to access LinkedIn data and build deep, rich integrations. And we will be announcing the next handful of well-recognized partners shortly. This is not a public program at this time. We have carefully built relationships to ensure the privacy of your profile and your connections. We want to make sure that every partner treats your privacy as carefully as we do.
We review dozens of partnership requests each week and will grant access to those partners who have a clear value proposition to LinkedIn users and can demonstrate that they will ensure your privacy. We are particularly interested in supporting jobs and career sites, news providers, and conference and events sites because we believe that these are excellent places where your LinkedIn network is very valuable to you.
• Broadly available integrations: Widgets allow us to provide integration to the thousands of sites and applications that want quick and easy integrations that respect user’s privacy settings. This week we will announce how to implement LinkedIn widgets on your own site. Other widgets will follow very shortly. Stay tuned to the blog. Feel free to also see the existing widgets on BusinessWeek.com and CIO.com today.
Google Friend Connect
With this as a backdrop, where does Google Friend Connect fit in? Google announced Friend Connect tonight (see my presentation at Google Campfire yesterday – video above) and we are one of the launch partners. You can see that Google Friend Connect fits well with our model. LinkedIn’s a part of Friend Connect since we believe that your data will be treated with the same care we administer. More details are available on the Google site.
When we started our Intelligent Applications platform, we outlined several examples of what we expected people would be able to do: see who you know at a conference, see who you know at a hiring company where you want to work, and see profiles of people you encounter in applications and on the web. With Friend Connect, we look forward to seeing the great new integrations that allows you to take your LinkedIn network to any site.
Putting it all together for developers
Consider using the widgets we produce because they are quick and easy to implement and give great integration opportunities. And as Google Friend Connect comes along, take a close look and see whether that is the right technology for your integrations. Either way, your site stands to benefit with deeper functionality and the advantage of bringing LinkedIn’s professionals network to your site.
If you want to develop an integration on your application or website, go here
If you want to develop an application that runs on LinkedIn, go here
Most of you reading this post have probably read my most recent announcement when we announced APIs and a platform strategy for developers to integrate LinkedIn into their applications, wherever it may be on the web. My my most recent post outlined how Apec, one of the largest job sites in France, integrates LinkedIn functionality into their site. Given below are a couple more examples of similar implementations: BusinessWeek and SimplyHired (with video demos):
BusinessWeek LinkedIn API Implementation
Ever read about a company doing something interesting or important and want to talk directly to the person at the company responsible for it? Now you can. Go to Business Week. Read an article. In the Story Tools area, you’ll see a link to see your LinkedIn connections at the company mentioned in the article.
Business Week has implemented the first LinkedIn widget to show you connections at a company mentioned on the page. It’s a simple Javascript widget that integrates your LinkedIn network with the content of the business article you are reading. This is definitely the start of many more such integrations across the web that’ll enable you to leverage the strength of your LinkedIn network.
Want to see how it works? Check out a video demo below.
SimplyHired – LinkedIn API Integration
Last time you looked for a job, did you ever want to know whether anyone could help you get in the door for an interview? Now you can do that on SimplyHired site, via a LinkedIn API integration. Look at a job posting and click the IN icon to see who you know at the hiring company. Then, simply reach out to them or a common connection and ask for help in getting the job. Check out a quick demo below where I walk through a similar scenario.
You’ll notice that this looks different from the Business Week integration. Simply Hired used the LinkedIn APIs to build the interface with specific names of people.
These first integrations are examples of integrations you’ll start seeing across the web on news sites, job sites, and more. For a deeper example, take a look at what Apec has done with the LinkedIn APIs in my earlier blog post here.
If you want to develop an integration on your application or website, go here
If you want to develop an application that runs on LinkedIn, go here
Several months ago, we announced we are working on APIs and a platform strategy for software developers to integrate with LinkedIn and display their application within LinkedIn. With the OpenSocial announcements, you can now see a lot more about how you can write applications that run inside LinkedIn. So, if you are a developer, what opportunities do you now have?
The Opportunity
There is a compelling opportunity to build on the LinkedIn platform, whether you are trying to augment your application with LinkedIn features or deliver your application into the LinkedIn web site. LinkedIn is a business network of nearly 17 million professionals, growing faster than one million new members per month. And people use LinkedIn for one purpose: to improve the way they do business. Have a great business-focused application? Something that improves productivity? You won’t find a more receptive or larger professional audience than you will at LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn, you will get that productivity application in front of more people faster than any other way on the Internet.
One Platform, Two Uses
The LinkedIn Intelligent Application platform enables two things:
• Bring LinkedIn to your application. Using LinkedIn APIs and widgets, you will be able to integrate LinkedIn into your application by accessing information from a LinkedIn user’s network. Using this model, you can augment your web site with LinkedIn features, creating more utility on your site and the chance to stand out from the crowd.
• Bring your application to LinkedIn. You will be able to write professionally-oriented applications that run inside LinkedIn.com for maximum visibility in a purely business network. We have announced support for Google’s OpenSocial platform and will add other models in the future.
APIs and widgets bring LinkedIn to your application
Over the past months we have been talking to hundreds of partners about how they would like to integrate LinkedIn into their applications. 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. Most every task we do on the web could be augmented by including the help, filter, or aggregate knowledge or our professional network.
So, we will provide a set of REST APIs and widgets that will let you build applications that include your user’s LinkedIn network. For example, when someone comes to your application and authorizes your application to use their LinkedIn account, you’ll be able to use their profile, their network, other LinkedIn profiles, network update feeds, and many other aspects of their LinkedIn account to enrich your application with pure professional networking.
The Open Social platform brings your application to LinkedIn
You will be able to build and run applications inside LinkedIn. We have announced support for Google’s Open Social platform and will include other ways in the future as well. In this model, you’ll be able to create an application that uses your own UI and back end and is augmented with the LinkedIn APIs. These applications will display within the LinkedIn.com web site and will be aware of the current LinkedIn user and his/her network. You’ll be able to create applications that run on user’s home and profile pages and more in the future.
But to leverage this distribution engine, you have to have a business productivity application. We recognize that business people have social lives and there are places for that. LinkedIn will remain focused on improving the productivity of people doing business and we’ll work with people fitting that standard.
Contacting Us
We’ll be phasing all of this in over the coming months and to get involved with the Intelligent Application Platform either for APIs, widgets, or hosted applications.
If you want to develop an integration on your application or website, go here
If you want to develop an application that runs on LinkedIn, go here
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