LinkedIn gets a beta facelift and developer platform

Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Blogging

LinkedIn gets a beta facelift and developer platform

by Chris Gilmer Dec 10th 2007

LinkedIn, the professional networking site, has released new features, including a homepage redesign and developer platform. Sure this is going to be a little more useful to business users, but does LinkedIn need to expand and focus outside the business sector to make things stickier?

LinkedIn's new focus seems like an effort to emulate what Facebook has had with outside web applications. The new LinkedIn beta homepage provides customizable modules that display network updates in a dashboard format. This allows users to potentially be more productive by showing what contacts are up to, what news is most important to colleagues and questions and answers from your specific industry with the use of familiar feeds. But why stop there?

People that do business together and are connected via outside interests could possibly do a lot more on the site if more personal based modules were available. However, this is just the beginning of a component that is part of Google's OpenSocial developer platform so we will have to wait and see what becomes of it.

Nonetheless it's great to see that LinkedIn is growing...mind you slowly, and cautiously building upon their platform. Will it manage to pull back business users that slipped away to Facebook for more personal networking with these developments? Could it possibly ever attract younger users?

Tags: business, dashboard, developer, facebook, google, linkedin, news, opensocial, platform, social-network

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

james 42 said 5:32PM on 12-10-2007

LinkedIn it to FaceBook as FaceBook is to MySpace. I don't see any need for them to try and expand into FaceBook territory. In fact, that's the nice thing about LinkedIn, it's for business.

Chris Gilmer said 5:49PM on 12-10-2007

I would have to agree @james 42 , i would like to see LinkedIn remain as a business specific network, and Facebook remain as a friends network. But, its what the users want, and Facebook users are making it into a business location, so what choice does LinkedIn have really? Other than to offer some "Facebooky" features.

Angel said 5:52AM on 12-12-2007

Well Linkedin is pretty different than all the other networking sites. Linkedin is very professional than any other social networking site. It can be termed as business networking site. More than fun people join Linkedin for purpose. I came across this site from some of the Blog which say Linkedin can be accessed over the phone without internet. In fact with this service, Linkedin access will be even more convenient than ever.
http://modazzle.com/cms/modazzleLp1.html?channel=CM&camp=LinkedIn

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