It’s hard to make any progress in social networking without opening up the service to outside developers. Even Facebook, arguably the most closed off social network, knows this and has made the most of its Facebook Connect offering. Now LinkedIn is looking to do the same with the announcement that it has finally opened up the site with the launch of a series of APIs aimed at third-party developers and services.
“Starting today, developers worldwide can integrate LinkedIn into their business applications and Web sites. Developer.linkedin.com is now live and open for business,” Adam Nash, LinkedIn VP of search and platform products, wrote. “This is the beginning of a new set of opportunities for the LinkedIn platform, and we look forward to seeing the integrations that developers will launch in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned for additional enhancements over during the coming months as we learn and grow this platform together.”
The APIs have been a long time coming, having been announced more than two years ago. And this was made worse by the fact that the platform has been greatly anticipated by many developers. There are plenty of social networks out there and plenty of them have interesting API offerings for developers, but none of them has the data th… (read more)