Taking a page from the Facebook playbook, social-networking site LinkedIn announced Monday that it will provide a platform for third-party developers. With Intelligent Applications, or InApps, developers can create plug-ins for LinkedIn.
While Facebook is oriented more to younger users, LinkedIn has been focused on professional and business types, and the new apps are expected to act appropriately. Dan Nye, LinkedIn Chief Executive, told news media that the new platform will enable the site’s professional users to be more effective in communicating with each other. “It’s not a place,” he said, “where you waste two hours of your time trying to find a date.”
In October, Nye similarly emphasized the site’s focus on professionalism. “We’re not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other,” he told the New York Times.
Several LinkedIn Changes
Being so choosy, LinkedIn has publicly discussed only one application. It will allow site users to hover over company names on BusinessWeek to see a list of people on LinkedIn who have some connection to that company.
By contrast, less-choosy Facebook reportedly has over 10,000 applications for its user platform, even though it was only released in May.
As part of its makeover, LinkedIn is testing a beta version of a new home page that is designed to make it easier for users to choose their contact path — either school-based or company-based.
There are also a variety of new features being rolled out to the site’s 17 million members, including ways to check the questions people in one’s network are asking, and LinkedIn News, an aggregated summary of headlines that is oriented toward a given user’s company and interests.
Trend Toward Being Open
LinkedIn is not the only social-networking site to follow Facebook’s path toward supporting outside developers, as other sites rush to create a similar kind of ecosystem. The trend…