LinkedIn Finally Opens Platform: The Good & Bad News
Two years and a month after announcing that it would launch a more professional-looking developer platform than the wildly successful one at Facebook, LinkedIn today finally opened up a series of application programming interfaces for other companies to build on top of. Make no mistake about it, though - there's some good news and there's some bad news.
LinkedIn holds an incredibly useful body of data about its users - not just because of the relatively high net worth it brags about its users having but because employment information is a very useful way to put a person in context on the web. That data is now available for an ecosystem of other developers to incorporate; TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbit and several other applications already have.
The Good News
- It's easy to get started. After two years of waiting, unreplied emails and heartbreak - developers should now be able to get an API key within minutes and start building on the LinkedIn platform. That's great news and not something that could have been taken for granted.
- The API allows search. That's great because with a little disambiguation done on the client side you can find the LinkedIn accounts of people you're connected to on other networks. Unfortunately, no one is doing exactly that yet - but isn't that the biggest value proposition here? I see a person on Twitter, on Facebook, on some other social network and I want to see what they do for a living. Let the app collect and expose that data from LinkedIn!
Disambiguation of people with the same name and privacy limitations regarding who gets to see who's information are both complicating factors. The coolest use of the search API we've seen so far is Salim Ismail and Rohit Khare's Knx.to. That service is limited to your own connections so far, but it's definitely a keeper.
- The API uses OAuth. That means that 3rd parties can offer fast, secure, standardized authentication into your LinkedIn user account. That's great.
- Activity updates are now parsable by type. The API allows developers to pull in just one type of the many updates a person gets on LinkedIn. Will someone please build an app that just shows me when my contacts change jobs and leaves out all the status messages, friend connections and other cruft? That kind of granular control has a lot of potential and is reminiscent of the vision behind the proposed user activity data protocol Activity Streams.
And Now For the Bad News...
- The first use-cases make it look like LinkedIn is trying to be Twitter. Tweetdeck and Posterous are the most high-profile early adopters of the new API; Tweetdeck will give you a LinkedIn column (too bad LinkedIn contacts can't be integrated into other columns) and Posterous will let you publish links to updates on that platform over to your LinkedIn contacts' streams. Jobdash looks like Tweetdeck just for LinkedIn and job-hunting, but it doesn't yet offer features like limited display of notifications by type - it's just a big stream of updates.
LinkedIn is not Twitter! LinkedIn's Adam Nash told us this morning that he loves the Twitter and Twitter-like integrations but "integrating messaging isn't the goal, there's a wide range of business applications that will benefit from it. Twitter is hot so people are jumping to that but there are far more compelling business cases."
Two years after the business-oriented platform was announced tiny Tweetdeck was just so hot it out-maneuvered all the business applications that could have been built to showcase? I don't buy it. Just like the formal partnership between Twitter and LinkedIn earlier this month, I worry that this API is built with marketing, promotion and broadcast functions best served.
- Terms and Conditions are unclear, restrictive and changing. The API terms say that you can't build applications that compete with LinkedIn. API management service Mashery CEO Oren Michels (disclosure: RWW sponsor) had this in response to say: "It appears that you can't create a new experience around LinkedIn, an iPhone app for example. You might create some interesting bolt-ons to other services that might drive users to linkedin.com - but that's a very 5 years-ago approach to an API."
"The signal from this is that they aren't encouraging developers to take the social graph and deep knowledge of peoples' professional lives and create new UIs for interacting with LinkedIn because they are explicitly concerned about competition," Michels said. "LinkedIn has amazing assets and a great business model - get out of the UI business!"
Likewise several developers have expressed concern around the commercial limitations on the API. LinkedIn's Nash clarified with us that those terms simply prohibit charging people extra money for access to the free LinkedIn service and building an advertising network on top of LinkedIn profile data because of privacy concerns.
Finally, the terms of the API aren't always clear. Michels points out that rate limits on accessing the API aren't made explicit - only that there will be rate limits and that a developer can email LinkedIn to request a personal expansion of their limit.
- Not playing nice with others: LinkedIn is exposing what it calls an Activity Stream, but it's not at all related to the standardized format that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others are now publishing. LinkedIn publishes some Microformats but has been entirely absent from the wide-ranging community discussion of Activity Streams formats, we're told.
Michels may have said it best: "There are some really smart people over there at LinkedIn. If this is what we waited 2 and a half years for, it's a bit disappointing."
It is a bit, but not entirely disappointing. We look forward to seeing how the platform evolves and what kinds of applications are built on top of it. The web has been waiting a long time for a LinkedIn platform - now let's see what happens.
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Do you know if they've got guidelines on branding or are they going to be as anal about it as Facebook are?
"I worry that this API is built with marketing, promotion and broadcast functions best served."
How is that a bad thing? It used to be that the LinkedIn API required an up front, negotiated business agreement with LinkedIn. For some reason, presumably a business one, LinkedIn management figures opening the API will increase future revenues or decrease future costs. How is that a bad thing?
Yes, there are guidelines on brand use.
I have an application that can use this :)
I agree terms of service will need to stabilize before they see widespread adoption.
"Not playing nice with others: LinkedIn is exposing what it calls an Activity Stream, but it's not at all related to the standardized format that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others are now publishing. LinkedIn publishes some Microformats but has been entirely absent from the wide-ranging community discussion of Activity Streams formats, we're told."
Arrg! Not only did I predict they wound't *really* open up, and they are whitewashing the word "open" ( ala Facebook and Adobe )...
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/07/21/parsing-the-open-in-adobes-open-source-media-framework-announcement/
...they've hi-jacked "activity stream" and they are not using the standard?!?!?!?
Evil!
Ribbit [client] integrated the LinkedIn API into their Caller ID 2.0 feature inside of Ribbit Mobile (beta). When you call a friend, his/her LinkedIn profile will pop up and you can see they just changed jobs or got a promotion which is a great conversation starter.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done with the LinkedIn API, and as a LinkedIn user - I am looking forward to seeing what other developers put out there to help me connect deeper with my friends and business contacts.
Overall, the good news outweighs the bad, because at least now LinkedIn is engaged with its (potential) ecosystem. They know they have a long way to go in building a reputation for openness and responsiveness, but keep in mind this is, for LinkedIn, a major change in direction.
After all, “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood...” Congrats to their team, and thanks for the shout-out to http://knx.to/ — perhaps we'll go build that name-based search next :)
The API itself looks good.
Their terms against storing data on remote sites or on displaying it in most contexts make it completely useless for 99% of applications.
Hopefully they'll fix the ToS to make it so most sites can use it. In particular, they need to get rid of section 3.4, saying you can't store/cache data. And 1.5s on competition: couldn't they define anything on the web as competing with them?
And seriously, S1.8: if you build an app on LinkedIn they can audit your entire company and invade your offices. Is that a joke?
Thanks Marshall, I found them in the end. Two and a half years and you'd have thought they'd spent a few days on not producing a dog of a site to look at. Their guidelines for 3rd party developers use of logos isn't very practical for mobile developers. I can't imagine I'll ever be observing their clear space guidelines in any iPhone Apps I develop.
http://developer.linkedin.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/102-1101-6-1001/LinkedIn_ClearSpace.jpg
They do come across as super control-freaks yikes!
"You agree that we may crawl or otherwise monitor your Applications and you agree not to block or interfere with such efforts by LinkedIn."
And the word "indirectly" below, means paid apps will never know where they stand. I just happen to increase the price of my app for a new version that includes LinkedIn integration amongst others APIs I've included. Then what?
"Charge, directly or indirectly, any incremental fees (including any unique, specific, or premium charges) for access to LinkedIn’s Content or your integration of the APIs in your Application;"
The API itself looks good.
Their terms against storing data on remote sites or on displaying it in most contexts make it completely useless for 99% of applications.
Hopefully they'll fix the ToS to make it so most sites can use it. In particular, they need to get rid of section 3.4, saying you can't store/cache data. And 1.5s on competition: couldn't they define anything on the web as competing with them?
"You may not store or cache any Content returned or received through the APIs" is real killer for us on http://friendbinder.com I can't see how we can't implement with that in there.
Remarkable analysis.
One small thing: the JobDash URL is wrong (it's a .net domain)
Great coverage, Marshall. Employment history has been one of the most frequently requested additions during alpha testing for http://flavors.me. We were close to giving up and turning to Facebook.