Following Facebook’s lead, Linkedin announced on Monday that it was ready to open up its platform to outside developers wanting to create apps. This announcement comes in well under the nine-month mark originally projected by founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman back in July.
Facebook’s success in opening up its own platform to developers has put increasing pressure on other social networking sites wanting to stay relevant in the online social world. Linkedin even acknowledges that many of its users had been prodding the social giant in that direction for a while.
If you’re not familiar with the use of apps on social networking sites, here’s a brief rundown:
Apps (applications) are third-party generated and placed for use on a social networking site. They range in genre from games and social quizzes, to linking other social networking sites together (i.e. allowing your tweets to automatically be posted as status updates on Facebook, etc).
While Facebook allows anyone to come in and create an app for its site, Linkedin is going to be more choosy, and understandably so, since it would be hard to justify adding an alien-shooting game to a site promoting professional networking.
It sounds like Twitter, Tweetdeck, and WordPress, among others, will be creating their apps for Linkedin – which will be good, since it will offer professionals yet another way to leverage their profiles and networking.
December 10, 2010 at 1:35 am
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