LinkedIn to Open Up - How It Can Take On Facebook
Dan Farber talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference, and was told that over the next 9 months LinkedIn will deliver APIs for developers. It seems that LinkedIn has been hurried onto this open track due to the hype surrounding Facebook's new open platform. Dan also reports that LinkedIn wants to "create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LinkedIn notifications." Nick O'Neill has a post discussing the ramifications.
Of course I agree that opening its platform to developers is the best (the only?) way for LinkedIn to take its service to the next level. Interestingly Alex Iskold wrote about this back in January, and his post then is well worth re-visiting now.
Alex first analyzed LinkIn's current features, then he suggested some new ones that LinkedIn, or external developers via APIs, might want to introduce:
Notably absent are features that let the users feel the network. For example, it would be great to see a visualization of all of my connections as a network; and on a map. It would be also great to be able to explore my network, using a visualization technique like Thinkmap. Another more subtle thing that is missing from LinkedIn is the strength of the relationship. Not all of my connections are equal, some are much stronger than others. This is a very valuable piece of information that can help a lot with things like lead generation. It is not easy to capture the strength of the relationship, but even a trivial heuristic like 'number of times I've clicked on someone's profile' would be a good start.
Alex concluded (and remember this was mid-January, before Facebook announced its open platform in May):
Today Facebook is much more about interactions and staying in touch - on a practical basis - daily. LinkedIn is about staying connected over longer periods of time and leveraging business connections for business purposes. It seems to us that LinkedIn needs to evolve more towards the Facebook model, where people can interact more on the site via profiles. Unlike Facebook, the interactions between individuals on LinkedIn cannot be open to all - but the idea that people interact on the site is important, because this is what keeps them coming back.
What do you think about LinkedIn and how it can compete with the increasingly powerful Facebook?
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Ever since reading Tim O'Reilly's post, I'm convinced that the biggest social network exists right under our fingertips. It's not Facebook or LinkedIn... it's existing communication.
All social networks require their users to have an e-mail address, but then limit you to only adding those who are within the service. Why is it that I can only add those who already exist within the service? Is it fair to my contacts in LinkedIn that I cannot add an important CEO just because he doesn't exist within the service... because he's too busy to register, build a profile, and maintain it?
Social networks, as we know them, cannot scale to the size that e-mail has. In a closed network, it just isn't possible. Imagine the response if Gmail said "sorry guys, you can now only send and receive messages from the Gmail domain."
So why not base a service around something that 1.2 billion people actively use? In other words, let me upload contacts, let me tag them, and let them continue to build the social grid. Not only does that enable me to have more efficient communication, but it's scalable because it's built on the backbone of e-mail (or other communication). The network already exists - someone just needs to make it social.
Great comment by Robert. Getting back to the specific question, I currently use LinkedIn and Facebook in very different contexts. Not being in the tech industry, I would say that 80%, perhaps 90% don't have Facebook accounts and are unlikely to, at least I don't think so. If LinkedIn sticks to a "professional network" mindset, it can add features and continue to stay relevant. In the meantime, I will continue using both (of course, LinkedIn is not half as addictive as Facebook is, but it is decent for what it does)
Strangely, LinkedIn has never allowed a great degree of personalisation of a user's profile...why can't I include a profile image or more than *three* external links...why no LinkedIn application for Facebook? C'mon - let's see some innovation!
Very good point Robert. I was about to ask, why do we need APIs to add new features? LinkedIn have developers - why can't they just add what used to be known as a 'feature'?
Visualisations and maps aren't anything groundbreaking that LinkedIn couldn't do - Digg experiment with flash visualizations in their labs, Google have always had labs, maybe LinkedIn should as well.
I don't think linkedin could really compete with Facebook, at least not currently, as I see it as something with quite a different purpose.
I use facebook to chat to my friends, poke people ;) etc
Whereas linkedin is much more of a 'serious social network' in my opinion, used for extending business connections etc.
I would, however, like to see a linkedin application for facebook!
as someone who has avoided facebook for ages I started to use it over the weekend and have to say liked some of the innovative features - tagging people in pictures - auto find people from your email contacts list .. I also used linkedin but as already stated these are for two very different purposes....
Time is of the essence. I think LinkedIn has two options available to it if it wants to maintain its position as the leader in professional networking:
(1) Open up an API/Platform THIS SUMMER (not "within the next 9 months") to enable app development by third parties, but limit the deployment of such apps to those that are "serious" and for professional networking.
(2) Deploy a LinkedIn-on-Facebook application on the Facebook Platform THIS SUMMER to become the de facto "professional" networking app as Facebook becomes the dominant general social network (slowly killing MySpace and the ankle-biters). This will probably result in the eventual acquisition of LinkedIn by Facebook.
Wayt
Hi Richard
What an odd week, LinkedIn rumours of an API, Facebook on the up and up, Xing does a deal with ZoomInfo and today Plaxo 3.0 beta makes a public return. Like Alex I wrote about LinkedIn back in January about this being the year of the business social network and what features they should add.
http://www.vecosys.com/2007/01/09/are-you-going-to-be-linkedin-or-lockedout-this-year
Speaking with LinkedIn's developers on several occasions they know they need OpenID, XFN (import/export), visualisation and many more features but they are not being allowed to do so internally. In January there was a flurry of activity from LinkedIn and in the last three months nothing at all?
The plaxo 3.0 beta is very good and even has a synch feature with linkedin.
The one feature I want to see all of these networks add is VoIP. I would love to see LinkedIn with Skype presence and VoIP. Where I could have a diary for my contacts i.e an online PIM.
Will LinkedIn evolve, sadly I don't think so ... and we will be left with finding an alternative. Right now I am intrigued by Plaxo having given up on it and Xing is a good outside option.
My major problem with LinkedIn is that even though both Facebook and LinkedIn have viewing restrictions (you're limited as far as whose profiles you can look at best on their relationships to you) I never notice them when I use Facebook.
LinkedIn really needs to, as you said, let people "feel" the network. It's so hard to actually feel connected to your contacts when using the service.
Not only that, lets not forget relatively complexity. I think that if anything they should allow their user base redesign their UI. Out of the box, LinkedIn is orders of magnitude more irritating to set up then Facebook.
Then again, I almost wonder whether the comparison between the two services should be drawn at all. Shouldn't they be going after different demographics? Or has it come to the point where other Social Networks can only hope to cherry pick portions of Facebooks demo?
I'm excited about this API, even though it might take all of 9 months. I have no idea what the architecture of LinkedIn looks like (all the under-the-hood stuff), and how much rewriting they would need to do just to clean things up and move forward. I think having the APIs will let other companies or individuals leverage cool stuff without having to pay for the design, development or maintenance of such coolness.
I am anxious to have access to these APIs (even though we really don't know how open they are going to be) because a marriage between LinkedIn and my website (JibberJobber) makes a ton of sense. View your network graphically - check. Put your network on a map - check. Keep log entries (journals, as commented above) - check. Create action items - check. And a lot more that is career-oriented that others in this space may not have thought about.
That's the beauty of enrolling others, you get lots of great, creative ideas. For free.
Right now I have import/export for LinkedIn, Outlook, and any other system that interacts with csv files. But a real API is going to be an awesome value-add for my users.
Jason Alba
CEO - JibberJobber.com
:: self-serve job security ::
Hi,
I also wrote a post about it, have about the same conclusion as most: Facebook and Linkedin are two separate social networks, that can overlap in part but not become one. And Linkedin definitely needs some more social features!