LinkedIn’s Intelligent Applications Platform and Google Friend Connect

These past few months LinkedIn has been building a platform that lets you use your LinkedIn network both on and off LinkedIn. We’ve talked about taking your network with you as you navigate the web and using it to get work done, advance your career, and discover connections.

We facilitate this in two ways:

• 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