AdverClast

A Chronicle of Disruptive Advertising

Applications on LinkedIn, Niiice

On October 28th, 2008 LinkedIn took a big step forward by announcing the launch of “Applications on LinkedIn” (or InApps) and officially joining MySpace, Facebook, Google and Apple’s iPhone in the “platform” business. However, unlike other open platforms, LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman focused attention on ten applications by eight companies. It appears LinkedIn is going to play more of a gatekeeper role ensuring that their applications don’t become flooded like the 24,000+ Facebook apps and 5,000+ iPhone apps.

As many are available on the internet, what is it about these InApps that creates unique value for the LinkedIn community? In general, functionality in this release empowers the average LinkedIn user with blogging and collaboration tools. Further, each app appears to have dual modes. That is, an aggregation role that can be viewed on your homepage, and a publishing role that appears on your profile page. While I was unable to load the applications on IE and Mozilla browsers (beta glitches), using their detailed descriptions, I’ve prioritized the LinkedIn apps based on what I think is their unique, innovation value. There are some gems in there:

First Tier - These are killer apps!
Business Travel Dashboard by Tripit - Niiiice! Part travel planner; part social networking tool Tripit lets you load your trip details, communicate it to relevant contacts on your network, see who will be close to you at various points during your trip… I predict this will be the #1 most installed application out of this group.

Company Buzz by LinkedIn - Like search.twitter.com, Company Buzz lets you identify topics to track. But, it goes further to include trend data and buzz words used in conjunction with your keyword. It also enables you to share interesting tweets with your contacts. While this will only be interesting in the immediate term to tech companies and products that Tweet volume, it’s a feature that “reputation management” firms have been paying for for some time.

Workspaces by Huddle - Collaboration and sharing tools for your LinkedIn network. Includes private workspaces for team collaboration, document sharing including check in/out and annotation, discussion forums, and file storage and management. As most companies, schools, etc. have collaboration tools in place, this tool will be useful to people who share work across an ecosystem. For example, I share design specs with contract programmers in India and creative specs with contract designers in Vietnam. Standardizing around a Workspaces / LinkedIn solution would be very helpful.

Second Tier - Many folks will find these valuable.
Box.net - Upload your files for storage on Box.net servers through LinkedIn. If you work in a business where your profile is not complete without examples (creative you’ve worked on, example source code you’ve written, etc.), Box.net lets you augment the current two dimensional profiles with your body of work.

Presentations by SlideShare AND Google - Upload and embed your presentations into your profile. Bloggers will be familiar with SlideShare embeds. One of the slickest features of that application is its ability to scan like presentations and make recommendations for further reading / review. While the feature will offer dimensionality to one’s professional profile, the reality of presentations is that they often have multiple authors. Presumably there will be some means of attribution.

BlogLink by Six Apart - Place your blog content on your LinkedIn profile. Posts content that people w/in your network have created to your LinkedIn homepage. Appears they’re drawing a bead on FriendFeed which has heretofore performed the aggregation play for much of the digerati by pulling together the blog posts, Facebook updates, iLike music preferences and so on. Does it make sense to also post this content to LinkedIn? Yes. For LinkedIn, it aggregates content and may act to centralize professional discourse on the LinkedIn platform. Due to the nature of algorithmic search, concentrating keyword-laden text will increase the number of LinkedIn pages in Google search results, increasing traffic, leading to more user registrations, more content, more traffic. For me, it links my blog comments to my profile, a link that heretofore viewers of my profile may not have been making.

Third Tier - Value is dependent on uptake
Wordpress blog posting - Publish your blog entries to your LinkedIn profile. While it allows the user to specify which blog updates to publish to LinkedIn, unlike Six Apart’s BlogLink, it does not appear to aggregate contact-network blog posts.

Reading List by Amazon - An interesting use of the Amazon’s vaunted inference engine. See what people in your industry are reading, what your contacts are reading, what individual “influencers” or WatchList are reading. While it would take 25+% penetration before the data is at all reliable, it could yield interesting results.

All in all a very impressive group of applications and significant step forward for the LinkedIn platform. The big InApps winners will be Twitter, Tripit and Huddle who will see significant uptake in usage as a result of LinkedIn integration. What else would I like to see? Stay tuned for the next post!

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Category: APIs, Applications On, Blogs, Facebook, Google, Social Networks, Twitter, Widgets, iPhone
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