Apparently suffering from a bit of application envy, LinkedIn announced Tuesday that it has implemented its own platform for running apps on its professional-networking site. In keeping with LinkedIn’s strong business focus, the new service is called Intelligent Applications, or InApps.
“Our audience is a professional audience, it’s not the typical social-network audience,” says Jamie Templeton, LinkedIn’s vice president of platform products. “They don’t want noise.”
The serious nature of LinkedIn can be seen both in the limited number of initial apps and their business purpose. According to Reid Hoffman, chairman and president, products, at LinkedIn, the goal is to enable the service’s 30 million members to communicate, collaborate and share information more easily.
“This initial rollout features productivity applications that range from gathering information that professionals around you are generating to enhancing your abilities to collaborate and communicate more effectively,” Hoffman said on the LinkedIn blog. “You’ll be able to work much more closely with your contacts on LinkedIn with tools such as file sharing, project management, business trips, and many more.”
The company is offering nine apps to start: Reading List from Amazon, WordPress, Box.net, Blog Link from Six Apart, Company Buzz by LinkedIn, SlideShare presentations, Google Presentation, My Travel, and Huddle Workspaces.
Some of these apps — like the file sharing in Box.net, the collaborative work spaces in Huddle, or the slideshow resources — may offer a productivity boost. Others — like Amazon’s dynamic reading list or LinkedIn’s own Company Buzz, which provides a customized Twitter feed from coworkers — may cause headaches for management and IT departments.
Nonetheless, LinkedIn has added apps to keep it from becoming too stodgy and because the incoming generation of workers have grown up in a social-networking environment.
Unlike the freewheeling app environments on Facebook or MySpace, LinkedIn has made it clear that…