LinkedIn gets out platform and does a site makeover

LinkedIn, the social networking site for business professionals, is making additions to its site design and opening up to developers with the Intelligent Applications API.

An excerpt from News.com:

But of more interest to the geek crowd may be “InApps” (short for Intelligent Applications), LinkedIn’s answer to the myriad developer platforms that have emerged in the wake of the Facebook Platform. But InApps won’t bring food fights and zombies to LinkedIn, something that became clear early on when executives started hinting that the company would unveil a developer initiative. Rather, this will be a select group of productivity applications including internal widgets (a calendar of conferences, for example) and code for porting LinkedIn functions to external Web sites.

The new API is indeed being welcomed by the online community with the advantages that come to making your professional profile information available within and outside the site.

It is the feature of enabling profile data to be pulled to outside Web pages that makes the API more relevant to professionals. LinkedIn has already announced a partnership with BusinessWeek that highlights the contacts of a reader working for an organization from which the business article is based.

On the design side, there are feeds and headlines from several blogs and news sites and several new additions to profiles.

LinkedIn is also part of Google’s OpenSocial initiative, a collaborative approach to developing a common API for social-networking applications.

More information:

• LinkedIn Needs to ReachOut (GigaOM)
• LinkedIN opens itself to developers (Top Tech News)
• LinkedIN gets Web 2.0 makeover (InternetNews)

What are your comments about the new features on LinkedIn?