LinkedIn Mobile (iPhone) with better communication features

LinkedIn Mobile is an exciting project not just for mobile users but also mobile developers. The application is built using Ruby on Rails. On the back end, it makes use of the new LinkedIn APIs to RESTfully communicate with the LinkedIn business logic layer as well as memcache for boosting application performance.

On the front end, we use the Rails custom format facilities to generate custom views for mobile (WAP) and iPhone. In order to make WAP work for most phones in the market, we restrict ourselves to XHTML MP Basic and WCSS. We also designed the app to ensure a good UI experience, even on phones that have CSS support disabled.

For iPhone, we implemented our own small (< 4KB) javascript library to enhance the user experience with features including AJAX loading in background, alphabar on Contacts page, and DOM page caching. The result is rewarding the interface is responsive even on a slow network.

Since we launched LinkedIn Mobile, we are pleased to receive many feature requests from the users and we would like to let you know that we are working hard on them. In the last few weeks, we introduced the following features:

* Sending messages to your connections via LinkedIn

* See status updates in your network

* Browse your connections' connections

In addition to the above three features, you can also email your connections from your handset and you'll definitely notice a quicker access to your LinkedIn app on the iPhone. Yes, we just made your iPhone experience better, faster and more productive.

Please continue to send us feedback and thank you for using LinkedIn Mobile. Check out below my original video on LinkedIn Mobile - a crash course on accessing LinkedIn on your iPhone.