The business oriented social networking site LinkedIn has served as a major platform for professional networking, spanning more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. Changing the dimensions of keeping business connections and generating and capturing the job opportunities, the site has well managed its 50 million users globally.
As social media revolution marches up, following the trend, LinkedIn too moves forward to join the league by release of its APIs and the launch of its LinkedIn Platform, which will enable developers to integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and websites. It has launched a developer site developer.linkedin.com that has APIs and widgets for those interested in features that let site users access their LinkedIn profile and contacts externally.
“Over fifty million users entrust their professional identities and relationships with LinkedIn, helping build LinkedIn into the largest global professional network today,” says LinkedIn’ Adam Nash in the blog. “However, professionals around the world use a wide variety of applications and Web sites to get their work done, and they have spoken loud and clear that they want the ability to leverage their professional networks wherever they work.”
LinkedIn has recently partnered with Microsoft, IBM and RIM’s BlackBerry, via which the professional networking site will integrate with Outlook and Lotus Notes. Also a LinkedIn mobile application will soon be available for the BlackBerry users.
“Over the past months, LinkedIn has supported integrations with some of the most prominent and critical software applications in the enterprise. Partnerships with companies like IBM, Blackberry (Research in Motion), and most recently Microsoft, have given us time to invest in both functionality and scalability of the platform,” said Nash.
Twitter client TweetDeck is already utilzing the LinkedIn platform and have announced that it will soon allow users to plug in their LinkedIn contacts’ status updates alongside Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace contacts.
Developers interested in using LinkedIn in their apps need only fill out a form at the site to receive a unique key. The LinkedIn platform leverages the open OAuth standard to make integrations from almost any language and development environment as simple as possible.
Linkedin is a great place to connect with people and share information from business point of view. It would be interesting to see what kinds of apps take advantage of LinkedIn’s APIs. The API release will provide a rich customer experience and also increase traffic and business for the site taking it to the next level of business networking.
Image Source: http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/23/linkedin-platform-launch/
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