Wait a minute...the two social media companies with some of the most valuable, interesting data on the web made a deal and what do we get? Spammy Twitter streams clouding up our LinkedIn feeds and an occasional uptight Tweet on Twitter that was born inside LinkedIn? We're still waiting for the meaty announcements everyone says are coming someday soon - that Twitter and LinkedIn are open for business.

But is business just about broadcasting your marketing message? What about the listening part of doing business, thoughtful analysis, responding to actionable information and market conditions? Conversations with your customers and business partners?

Twitter is arguably better for listening than it is for broadcast and conversion of marketing messages. This kind of cross-posting deal falls short of the huge potential latent in the data both of these companies control and instead appeals to the craven broadcast-model of marketing. Challenging that broadcast-model is where many people believe social media derives its meaning.

What could this look like? It could look like an option to view the employer and job title of anyone you see on Twitter or through a 3rd party Twitter interface. It could look like Twitter opening up its fire hose for unfettered 3rd party analysis and development - then you'd see social graph and content analysis done that gave a big boost to the User Experience on LinkedIn. ("This LinkedIn user has been conversing with friends on Twitter who were talking about 'mobile,' 'Wisconsin' and 'gaming' over the last 2 weeks.")

Whatever the case may be, both occupational data (LinkedIn) and social messaging data (Twitter) are rich green fields for mashups and analysis - but these two companies are holding back the tide of innovation by refusing to offer a clear path to their data by outside partners.

LinkedIn partners with next to no one. Only large, established organizations like Business Week, the New York Times and now Twitter get access to LinkedIn data. Other services all around the web will tell you stories about reaching out to LinkedIn for API access and getting the cold shoulder.

We wrote about this concern three weeks ago ("LinkedIn Hits 50 Million Users; Still a Roach Motel") and the company told us then and today that big changes are coming to its API soon. That's great. That's something to look forward to, if cautiously. We're years into the LinkedIn Platform today and there's only a select few partners doing anything there so far.

Likewise, Twitter is fabulously open with its data in some ways (on a per-item basis) - but it's leaving a substantial number of outside developers frustrated because they can't get their hands on the full feed of Twitter data (the fire hose) to analyze. Startup companies that do appear to have relationships with Twitter tell us things like "We won't describe our relationship with Twitter to you and neither will anyone else who has one." That's charming. It's unclear whether anyone but Google and Bing have access to all the Twitter data.

Twitter investor and real-time web guru John Borthwick told us in another conversation today that he believes Twitter is just in its early days as a company, that there's nothing mysterious going on. "I'm hoping there will be a click-thru EULA [End User Licensing Agreement] to the firehose [someday]," he wrote. (Emphasis added.)

That sounds good.

So everybody's working on the wide-open web that so many of us want to see? Standards and APIs and open platforms to facilitate a new era of innovation are right around the corner?

Sounds great. For now though what we get is a little cross-network message broadcasting. Hopefully it's just the beginning.

One of the main new features of the revamped LinkedIn is the global navigation bar at the top of the page which links to all the site's features including profile, contacts, groups, jobs, your inbox, and more. Click on any of these items and a drop-down menu will appear providing you with further options. This gives the most important navigational aspect to the site a more modern look than it had before when each section was displayed in clickable tabs of different shades of blue.

The company also touts how the new look and feel also makes room for more page content with less scrolling needed in order to see everything on the page. This is also true to some extent. However, on your homepage where network updates and group updates are featured, the amount of scrolling depends on the size of your network and how active the network members are. For example, under the "group updates" section, updates for the past seven days were posted followed by a section that included updates from the prior week. That actually led to quite a bit of scrolling to see them all. It's not necessarily a bad feature, though. After all, LinkedIn isn't the sort of site we're logging into on a daily basis so it's nice to be able to catch up when we're there... even if that means the homepage screen extends downward forever.

Also new on the homepage are moveable, collapsible sidebar modules which can display things like who's been viewing your profile, events, job listings, applications you've added, and more.

Cleaner Look Highlights Ads

One downside of the site's "cleaner" look is how much more noticeable the ads are now. Of course, to LinkedIn this may be an upside. Although the ad placements are no different than before, the new look makes them really stand out. Since everything is now black or blue text on a white background, the full-colored ad at the top of the screen is the first thing to draw your eye upon login. There's also a text link ad directly below the global navigation that demands your attention. It's in the exact place where a company message would normally appear and the font used is a darker, bolder blue than anything else on the site. Both of these elements are somewhat distracting, but we suppose there's nothing that you can really do about ads. Still, we wish that the network had taken a page from Facebook's book when it came to ad placement - when you log into Facebook, the first thing you notice is the content and the updates, not the ads.

LinkedIn says the updated design was based on years of data from usability research but what you're seeing now isn't necessarily the final product. They're still iterating and, based on user feedback about the new look, they may make some additional changes in this and other areas.

Still Needs Improvement: the LinkedIn Inbox

One thing that still hasn't improved, sadly, is the LinkedIn inbox. Although the homepage view of the inbox provides a handy "take action" button which lets you quickly accept, reject, or archive requests, the full inbox view still forces you to click each message to accept or reject requests - there are no bulk actions you can take from the inbox screen besides archiving or marking messages as read or unread. Even worse, after accepting or rejecting a request, the message remains in your inbox until you manually archive it, necessitating quite a bit of additional work if you've let those invites pile up.

What Do You Think?

Are you impressed with the new look for LinkedIn? Or did you prefer the old tabbed interface better? LinkedIn obviously hopes that by simplifying the navigation and site elements which help to better engage users that they will spend more time exploring and interacting with the various site elements. Do you think that will be the case? Or do the underlying features of LinkedIn need improvement as well?

"What do you do for a living" is one of the most potent questions a person can be asked and online that means LinkedIn. Unfortunately, in this era of data portability and connected social networks, LinkedIn isn't playing very nicely.

Programmatic access to LinkedIn data is reserved for a very select few high-profile API partners. The company appears to operate under the assumption that only heavyweight partners could move the needle for its bottom line, not a thriving ecosystem of independent innovators. Hardly surprising for a company that spends so much of its time in public talking about how wealthy its users are.

FriendFeed used to include updates to your LinkedIn profile in the activity streams it displayed. That was great, but there was nothing official going on - FriendFeed was scraping LinkedIn. When LinkedIn added a layer of obfuscation over its HTML, FriendFeed took the hint and stopped, the now Facebook-owned company says.

Why not make LinkedIn all the more valuable by making it the currency that social sites all around the web make us of? Would that not drive all the more people to LinkedIn itself, to fill out their profiles there? It's possible that LinkedIn has done a serious analysis of the benefits of a developer ecosystem vs. very limited partnerships and come to the conclusion that it has - but it still seems like a real shame.

Imagine the innovation that could be made possible by developer access to LinkedIn!

Congratulations to LinkedIn for hitting 50 million users. Now please open up the data! Otherwise we'll have to cheer for a more open competitor to challenge your dominance in this market.

Update: Adam Nash, Vice President, Search & Platform Products at LinkedIn, says things are set to improve in the future. Below in comments he writes: "Marshall, I think you'll be quite happy with our plans for improvements to our APIs. Stay tuned." Fantastic! Let's see what you've got, Adam.

With Profile Organizer, bookmarking is simple. Users save contacts with one click and are given the option to create category files for their contacts. If you want to separate the product managers from the designers or the engineers from the HR staff, you can. Users are given the chance to name their contact folders by occupation, location or other relevant labels. From here you can also choose to add contact information and notes. The information is only visible to you so you can be as descriptive as you like. If you don't already have a tool like Salesforce, the notes section is a great place to jot down a contact's interests and hobbies. If you're the type of person who needs more to jog your memory, it's also a great place to record the details of your last conversation.

The Profile Organizer is available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30-day trial. Business members can access the service but are given a limit of 5 contact folders. Meanwhile, Business Pro and Pro members can create as many as 25 contact folders. To test the new product visit Linkedin.com/organizer.

Some of the conclusions were a real surprise. Others confirmed our suspicions. Read on for charts, bullet points and a few thoughts.

Just for context, we'll start with a traffic graph.

Key takeaways from the poll:

Overall

• Twitter is #1, leading Facebook by a respectable margin
• The iPhone is considered less important than LinkedIn
• Almost no-one thinks Digg is the most important
• There is no consensus; every platform named (except for Digg) has a group of backers that believes it is most important.

About the respondents

• 3,615 respondents is a very good number


• Only 4% were business owners, 26% managers, 56% non-managers


• 75% were from small businesses


• 26% were marketers, the largest percentage among job functions


• Twice as many men responded as women


• 83% of respondents were between the ages of 25 and 54, only 17% younger or older

Most appreciative of Twitter: Business owners, C-Level or VPs. People at large- or medium-sized companies. People doing business development, marketing or creative work.

Least appreciative of Twitter: Non-managers. People at very large or small businesses. Consultants, Salespeople and Engineers.

Most appreciative of LinkedIn: C-level and non-managers. At small- or medium-sized businesses. Doing consulting or sales.

Least appreciative of LinkedIn: Owners and managers. At large or enterprise companies. In creative or marketing departments.

By Job Title

• Business owners are most likely to put Twitter at the top, non-management people are least likely
• Non-managers are most likely to favor LinkedIn, owners are least likely
• Non-C-level or VP managers are most likely to favor Facebook, owners are least likely
• About 1 out of 5 people in all positions favor the iPhone

By Company Size

• Large businesses are most likely to favor Twitter
• Medium and small businesses are twice as likely to favor LinkedIn
• Small businesses are twice as likely to favor Digg
• Medium-sized businesses are least likely to favor the iPhone

By Job Function

• Marketing, business development and creatives are most likely to favor Twitter
• Consultants and sales are least likely to favor Twitter
• Creatives and marketing are least likely to favor LinkedIn
• Consultants and sales are most likely to favor LinkedIn
• Consultants are most likely to favor iPhone, marketing least likely
• Engineers are far more likely to favor Digg than anyone
• Marketing is most into Facebook, business development the least (prefers Twitter)

By Gender

• Women are much more likely to prefer Twitter
• Men are more likely to favor LinkedIn, iPhone

By Age

• 55+ far more likely 75% than anyone to favor LinkedIn
• 25-54 more likely to favor the iPhone than younger or older people

So what do you think? Surprises? Confirmed beliefs? This looks like good quality data to us so we suspect we'll be thinking about it for a while. Two things are for sure - there's no topping LinkedIn for professional background information, and there's no chance we'd be able to trust a poll like this if it was performed on Twitter!

Thanks to Tom Humbarger for Twittering about this poll; that's how we found it.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.

Some people won't respond to email (or take a while to respond) but reply immediately when you contact them with Twitter direct messages. Other people do the same in Facebook or FriendFeed. And yet other people send messages that pile up in your LinkedIn inbox.

Oh, and then I get the Skype pings.

And Gmail chat requests.

Oops, almost forgot FriendFeed.

This is getting out of hand. Do what you gotta do. If one of these is the only way to reach somebody I need to reach, then I'll use it. But these are too many messaging systems, and they are becoming a productivity drain.

Open Standards Always Win

Lots of people say that email sucks, that it's broken. This "e-fail" mantra is really about the inadequacy of email systems, something that many entrepreneurs recognize and are aiming to fix. The reason why email will always be with us is that it is an open standard, and this mantra is always worth repeating:

• Open standards always win
• Open standards always win
• Open standards always win

Winners and Losers from a Standards Shakeout

Twitter has possibly gotten this right once again. Because it is open, anybody can build an interface for its direct messages.

LinkedIn totally fails on this count. LinkedIn is a great and very useful research tool. When I don't know how to contact somebody, finding out which of my contacts knows them is invaluable. I use it frequently. But then, I want to be able to contact that person by email (or telephone, or Twitter if that is their preference). LinkedIn's messaging system is simply an irrelevant chore.

Methinks Facebook messaging may go the same way. Not being a big Facebook user, I may miss the point. But I have noticed that the sort of person who in the past preferred to be contacted via Facebook now prefers communication via Twitter.

The Integration Opportunity

This pain point is, of course, an opportunity. This integration has been referred to in the past as "unified messaging," but many of those solutions were too complex. You needed to buy into everything to use it at all.

Some great solutions are probably already out there. I am not talking about something like TweetDeck, which is perfect for somebody who lives in Twitter. Rather, the interesting thing is integrating Twitter direct messages into existing messaging and email systems.

Twitter and LinkedIn

Twitter saw 84% of its downtime in the first half of 2008 and suffered no major outages in the second half of the year. Even though Twitter continues its rapid growth, it has clearly managed to gets its infrastructure under control.

The reliability of LinkedIn, however, is slipping. With every new quarter, LinkedIn's downtime increased. Clearly, LinkedIn's continuous growth is responsible for some of these outages. In terms of total hours of downtime , LinkedIn's 45.8 hours were only trumped by Twitter's 84 hours, though Friendster (43.8 hours) and Reunion.com (41.9 hours) were only marginally better off in 2008.

Other Stats

According to Pingdom, Reunion.com suffered the longest continuous outage, with close to 10 hours on March 29. Facebook's longest continuous outage only lasted for less than half an hour.

A majority of teens, percentage wise, join social networks, but it's the adults that still make up the bulk of these web sites. That's because adults make up a larger proportion of the U.S. population than teens, reports Pew Internet & American Life Project. So the 65% of online teens actually represents fewer users than the 35% of adults who participate online. Of course, out of that 35%, the adults that tend to join social networks still skews younger: 75% of those 18-24 use these networks, but only 7% of the adults 65+ do.

It's Not About Professional Networking After All

You may think that many adults have joined the online trend mainly to network professionally with others in their field. However, that turns out not to be true. Instead adults, like teens, are there to socialize with their friends and people they already know. Nearly nine in ten social network users (89%) say they use the networks to stay in touch with friends, and 57% say they use it to make plans with friends. Under half (49%) use the sites to make new friends.

Surprisingly, those on social networks for professional purposes are not as common as you may have thought. Only 6% of adults use LinkedIn, the online social network dedicated to professional networking, but 72% use other social networks (50% use MySpace, 22% use Facebook) for both professional and personal networking purposes. The most interesting finding is that less than a third of social network users are using them for professional purposes, regardless of which site they use.

More Tidbits: Demographics

Some other findings confirm what we've heard before about social networks: MySpace users are more likely to be women, Hispanic, black, and have a high school education or some college experience. The median age is 27. Facebook users are more likely to be male and have a college degree. The median age there is 26. LinkedIn, however, tends to be comprised of more older, white men with a college degree and median age of 40. The prevalence of men on these networks could be explained by the fact that men are more likely than women to have two or more online profiles (54% vs. 47%).

What It All Means

It appears that the trend of using social networking sites for professional purposes is not quite as common as we may have thought. Although there are portions of the population both young and old that do so, it isn't the main reason people join social networks. It's more common for people to go online to use the networks as they were originally intended - to socialize. That's not a bad thing, we suppose, but it will be interesting to see what this means for sites like LinkedIn, whose main purpose is to cater to the professional crowd.

We've already seen LinkedIn attempt to expand their network in new ways not too long ago. Just this past year, we've watched as LinkedIn added LinkedIn applications, an effort to make their network more interesting and dynamic. They also added helpful features for business-minded folks like the events section, which debuted last November. But it was only a month ago that the company brought in a new CEO, or rather, an old one - the company founder Reid Hoffman. Perhaps that means LinkedIn is planning to shake up their site and make it more relevant and popular among online users than it is today. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_adults_than_ever_on_socia.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/more_adults_than_ever_on_socia.php Trends Fri, 16 Jan 2009 06:15:13 -0800 Sarah Perez Commentary on this week's management changes at LinkedIn implied that a shake-up was needed to make LinkedIn more like Facebook. As somebody who has used LinkedIn extensively and spoken to many people who have also found it very useful, this is a plea to listen to users and not the Valley cognoscenti. Sure, when Facebook was "valued" at $15 billion, a bit of envy was understandable. But now that we're in the real world...

We want to spend as little time as possible so that we can get the job done, get off our computers, and have a life. LinkedIn is the most efficient place to hunt for customers and employees. It is the first real change in productivity for those who work on the front lines of business. We have written about how useful it is here and here, and we included LinkedIn in our Top 10 Enterprise Products for 2008.

So, repeat after me: LinkedIn is not a destination site. We thought the Valley intelligentsia long ago proclaimed the end of destination sites. The desire to "get people to spend more time on LinkedIn" is linked to a failed business model around advertising.

LinkedIn should be a "contact graph," accessible via the API tools that you need to get the job done.

Why Emulate Facebook?

When Facebook was nominally valued at $15 billion, envy was understandable. Now, word is that Facebook is worth more like $1 billion. And to prove I am not a recent jumper on the Facebook downward-rolling bandwagon, here is my bear case on Facebook from July 2007.

LinkedIn won't ever beat Facebook on page views. So why try? Beat it by being more useful. And then business people will pay.

SaaS businesses have been the quiet success story of 2008 and will romp home to glory in 2009. It is the perfect disruptive model for a downturn.

LinkedIn could be a great SaaS success story by mixing and integrating the right features to become the place where business people live and pay for services.

Contact Networking

Add a touch of integration with email, a pinch of basic CRM capabilities. Roll it all up into the biggest business contact graph on the planet. Ask $5 of each user per month, the "Google price." Juice up the returns with some transactional services, making money by connecting people.

If there is one company in the tech space I would own shares in if I could, it would be LinkedIn. As long as it stops trying to appeal to college kids.

1. Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008
2. Top 10 International Products of 2008
3. Top 10 Consumer Web Apps of 2008
4. Top 10 RSS and Syndication Products of 2008
5. Top 10 Mobile Web Products of 2008

Our Criteria

In no order of importance (all three are critical), we looked for three attributes for the top Enterprise web products:

1. Innovation: This is the time for firms that opened up entirely new market categories through disruptive innovation to reap the rewards.
2. Traction: We cannot put a cool new company whose product is just emerging from beta into our top 10. Winners should already have major traction in the market.
3. Longevity: This is a mix of profitability and deep pockets; an ability to outlast the competition.

The market categories that feature in this post are: platforms (with 2 companies making the list), wiki (2), web office (2), CMS 2.0 (1), project collaboration (1), web conferencing (1), and contact networking (1). Note that we didn't consider micro-blogging, RSS or mash-up products, as we consider those to be features rather than products - in the Enterprise market at least.

Drum Roll... and the List

Note: to avoid ranking them (which is impossible because they compete in different markets), the winners aren't in any particular order.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Who would have thought that a bookseller could have generated such enthusiasm and loyalty in the developer community? Eons ago, Microsoft won big by winning the hearts and minds of developers. Amazon does that today better than any other company.

Platforms will do well in 2009, though not many will. The platforms market is a race for scale, requiring massively deep pockets. We chose two, but they have lots of very strong competitors breathing down their necks.

Basecamp

37Signals, maker of Basecamp, is a lot of peoples favorite start-up (even its competitors feel obliged to say nice things about the company). The way they do project collaboration is almost as important as what they do. Their "less is more" elegance has become the mantra of developers everywhere. The one issue? It keeps its products separate. You have to choose which one to use. Vendors with suites could take advantage of this.

Confluence (Atlassian)

We are seeing major wiki adoption in the enterprise. It is simply a much easier way to collaborate than by putting lots of complex technology under the general umbrella of the Intranet.

It is hard to pick winners here. The space is crowded. In fact, we picked two for this category (MindTouch is the other). Atlassian seems a safe bet for enterprise, having traction and a good breadth of products. It is also nice that a vendor from the southern-hemisphere (Australia) made the top 10.

DimDim

This is our small-vendor recession play. In a recession, companies travel less, so they use web conferencing more. They also cut whatever budgets they can, and web conferencing isn't spared. DimDim's proposition is incredibly simple: web conferencing for less cost. The one issue? It is still a bit raw, and the company will need deep pockets to satisfy what we expect will be a growing demand.

Google Apps

Google Apps is one of Google's more mature offerings outside of search. It's a huge market, and Google has major traction. The move from PC-based office software to web-based "office tools" accelerated in 2008 and became increasingly mainstream.

The one issue? Google may be spreading itself too thin. Unbelievably, its flagship Gmail is still in beta and suffers from reliability issues, and some modules (such as for spreadsheet) still seem a bit raw compared to those of competitors.

Wordpress

This choice may be controversial. We see a big market in the replacement of first-generation content management systems (CMS), with simpler SaaS tools that have blogging at their core. Automattic's Wordpress is growing in reputation as the platform that delivers this the best.

Deciding between Movable Type and WordPress was a really tough call. Movable Type (which we use for ReadWriteWeb) has major traction in Enterprise accounts. In the end, we chose WordPress based on the quality of its continuous innovation. Salesforce, though, has recently entered this market from a totally different angle. We see CMS 2.0 integrating what are currently stand-alone features: social networking, video, and so on.

LinkedIn

This is a controversial pick. We see this as the "contact networking" space, which will be part of next generation CRM. We deliberately avoided the "social networking" label. Enterprises don't care about being social: they care about managing contacts to make money. Most people would not categorize LinkedIn as "enterprise." It would have been easier to include one of the many vendors that sell white-label enterprise social-networking software. We didn't do that for the same reason we didn't consider micro-blogging as a category: its more a feature than a category, much less a product or company.

But contact networking leader LinkedIn has tackled two of the biggest issues for enterprise: acquiring customers and hiring employees. And it has a huge networks-effect advantage over any of its competitors. It could easily create an "internal enterprise LinkedIn." This is LinkedIn's game to win or lose: it holds the cards in the contact graph deck.

MindTouch Deki

This is the other winner in the crowded wiki ++ space. You can tell a market is in the tornado-high growth stage of the market adoption cycle when it has really tough head-to-head competition. In this particular market, MindTouch and SocialText are banging heads. It looks like a close fight, too close to call really, but we had to make a call and went with MindTouch. It also competes with Atlassian, but not head to head.

We added "++" to "wiki" because the leading vendors are rapidly incorporating micro-blogging, social networking, forums, and other collaboration tools. Integration is key, so we see this market moving towards suites, but with wiki at the core.

Force.com (Salesforce)

This company defined the SaaS/cloud space with brilliant marketing and relentless focus. While it is clearly dominant in the SaaS CRM space, it is also a serious contender in the bigger platform space. If we had to pick one reason why Force.com is a major platform winner, it would be because of its focus on making its partner eco-system succeed. The one big issue? Its core CRM market is being undermined by two serious low-cost competors: SugarCRM and Zoho CRM.

Zoho

Zoho has so many apps, that we can't pick just one! But it is our David-vs-Goliath winner, so deserves to be on this list. At the beginning of the year, the web office market looked crowded. It now has Zoho (David) vs. Google (Goliath), with Microsoft, as always, not to be counted out. In fact, Zoho has yet another Goliath on its hands because it also competes with Salesforce in the CRM space, which points to its one big issue: it is spread very thin, and some of its products show it from their lack of depth.

Limiting It to 10 Is Hard!

This being a time of "back to basics," we had to forgo the luxury of an 11-winner list. We certainly did not allow ourselves a list of 100 companies, which would have kept everybody happy. So we know we have almost certainly missed your favorite company: we expect and hope you'll tell us in the comments.

We were looking for companies that would still be considered success stories one year from now, and hoping to avoid the embarrassment of hailing as a great success a company that crashes and burns in the harsh economy of 2009. That means our top 10 winners should be profitable, or very close to profitability, today. These are companies that would attract a big fat premium if they were to be acquired, even in a lousy market, because they would not be desperate for an exit and could afford to wait out the economy until markets and their valuations become healthier.

We're playing it safe with our top 10 list for one reason: because that is what buyers will be doing.

LinkedIn Events offers not just event search, but recommendations based on the contents of your profile, sophisticated information about attendees and updates about the events in your LinkedIn update feed. Eight thousand events are already listed and event organizers can ad more.

The recommendations are key here. Recommendation is like the search you didn't even know you wanted to do - it's a great way to surface value from noise.

Unfortunately the events page is down at press time, but we look forward to its return.

We like LinkedIn alot here at ReadWriteWeb (it's one of the primary news sources for our new site about hiring activity) and we think Events is a great addition to the service. The events feature appears to be built on the OpenSocial platform, so there's a good chance that these features will be available in other settings beyond LinkedIn in the future.

Until recently LinkedIn's website resembled something circa 1994. The latest overhaul of the UI makes it more accessible and useful, but still not fun - it's dominated by links, not people. What if LinkedIn refocused? What if there were elements of entertainment, story telling and human feel to the whole experience? In this post we ponder how the brand could become more fun.

Hint at Humanity - the iPhone App

When the LinkedIn App for iPhone came out I was struck by how a minor difference in user interface represents a big difference in perception. On the website, the list of contacts is dull and hard to sift through. iPhone implementation leveraged the standard widget for scrolling through lists and was spectacular.

As names of my contacts flew by, my brain started reminiscing: Oh I remember this person? Man, that was a fun project! I wonder where this person is now?.

I was compelled to click on some entries to see people's faces, to check their resumes.

The playful iPhone UI made the same LinkedIn information much more engaging. It instantly brought into the spotlight the most interesting aspect of LinkedIn - the people.

LinkedIn as Entertainment

LinkedIn is a great business tool - you can use it to find jobs or suitable candidates. It's helpful for introductions and lead generation, but it underplays human aspects of business connections. If LinkedIn were more interesting and entertaining, imagine what it could do?

The opportunity lies in a better user interface, lending itself to more exploration. A visualization like the one PicLens provides would be great fun - e.g. the ability to see peoples timelines visualized, such as 5 previous co-workers now working for Apple. It's essentially slicing and dicing information that LinkedIn has, though in a way that is playful and useful.

In addition to playfulness, there's a sentimental factor here. Enabling people to tap into their memories and recall co-workers. Imagine a flashback - your job at Yahoo. Remember Jane, John, Kate and Mike? Here's where they are now. Jane and Mike are still at Yahoo, John is engineer at Google by way of Microsoft, and Kate is working for a startup in Colorado.

Will Entertainment Pay?

Would this sort of thing help LinkedIn's bottom line? Not directly, because people are unlikely to pay for such entertainment as they pay for other LinkedIn features. But the pages would surely generate traffic and bring CPM advertising dollars. Facebook grew big because of entertainment.

It's cool to see pictures of friends, to know what they're up to, and to stay in touch. By adding this human focus, LinkedIn could become 'cool' in addition to useful.

What do you think about adding the entertainment dimension to LinkedIn? Is this something you'd like the company to do? What other features do you wish LinkedIn had?

With the launch of the LinkedIn Applications platform, they're hoping to change that by helping "over 30 million professionals on LinkedIn to communicate, collaborate, and share information even better than before." But they still remain focused on one thing: helping you find a new job.

Today's launch features nine resume-enriching applications:

• Prove you're more well-read than any of the other candidates with Reading Lists from Amazon.
• Share your portfolio pieces with potential employers or store that coveted letter of resignation with the file sharing of Box.net Files.
• Put that girth of presentation material on your machine to work for you with Google Presentation and SlideShare or use the apps to take a "creative" approach to pitching a new employer.
• Huddle Workspaces? Online job interviews. 'Nuff said.
• Show off your acerbic wit and unique insights with Six Apart Blog Link (which supports a variety of blog formats) or WordPress applications that bring your latest blog posts into your profile.
• Well traveled individuals - or those who are willing to go where the company tells them to go - are always in demand and with My Travel by Tripit you'll be able to show the lengths - literally - to which you're willing to go.
• LinkedIn even offers their own application - Company Buzz - that will help you determine the most appropriate companies for your to pursue.

The Facebook Elephant in the Room

Bring up LinkedIn and comparisons to Facebook quickly follow. Now that applications have entered the picture, that comparison becomes even more obvious.

So how do the two stack up?

ReadWriteWeb wrote about LinkedIn and Facebook nearly two years ago, concluding:

"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."

Six months ago, we approached the discussion again. At that point, we found LinkedIn gaining traction. "LinkedIn's value to users is clear; their value as a business, however, is less clear."

Today, LinkedIn continues to grow by providing that selfsame value to its user base. LinkedIn's new selective application platform - unlike Facebook's "every application under the sun" strategy - only strengthens that stance.

LinkedIn Remains Focused

Don't mistake where LinkedIn is going with this new feature set.

At first blush, LinkedIn may appear to be chasing the "portal play," especially when you couple it with the recent news of their content partnership with The New York Times or when you take a look at their latest investors.

But rest assured, LinkedIn has made a very successful business out of keeping you in contact with your former co-workers and, when the time comes, helping all of you find new gigs.

No matter what the economic conditions, people will always be looking for new jobs. If LinkedIn continues to add features and applications that facilitate that inevitable searching and hiring, they're sure to succeed. And this new application platform appears to be right in line with that focus.

During these uncertain times for many Web companies, the investment marks a decided vote of confidence in LinkedIn's strategy. Perhaps more importantly, the admittedly "strategic" investment hints at some potential partnerships for LinkedIn in the coming months.

LinkedIn CEO, Dan Nye, highlights:

"This funding strengthens LinkedIn further, and will help us to continue creating additional services for professionals to connect and collaborate more effectively, around the world."

What sorts of "additional services" might those be? It wasn't long ago that LinkedIn announced a content partnership with The New York Times. It doesn't take a drastic leap of faith to imagine a similar partnership with McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek.

SAP brings another potential partnership to the table. ReadWriteWeb's Bernard Lunn has hypothesized that "LinkedIn could replace Outlook and SalesForce." With SAP and its suite of business tools in the mix, that hypothesis could quickly become a reality.

But those are simply educated guesses. What's certain? LinkedIn is profitable, it has money in the bank, and it just convinced some additional heavyweights to invest in its vision. And that accomplishment - especially in light of the current financial atmosphere - is not to be taken lightly.

Today, we're introduced to what hopefully will continue the trend of more "serious" apps for iPhone: LinkedIn.

The LinkedIn App

The app features four different sections: the main page, connections, search, and status:

• The main page of the iPhone app displays a news feed that shows updates from your LinkedIn contacts - things like whether they've updated their profile, changed positions, asked a question, added a new contact, etc.

• The "Connections" section displays your LinkedIn contacts in a way that's very much like the iPhone's built-in contact list.

• From the "Search" section, you can search for contacts by name, keyword, title, or company.

• The "Status" section allows you to update your LinkedIn status, which many people use to announce what they're working on. Others have this hooked up via Ping.fm or a similar app so it's updated with their latest tweet.

However, one of the app's best features is its ability to copy LinkedIn contacts over to the contact list on your phone itself. You can download the app from the iPhone store here.

Business Apps Rock, Too

Although a lot of the focus in the blogosphere has been on "fun" apps, like Twitter clients, games, and social networking apps from Facebook and MySpace, the iPhone is offers a lot of apps for business users, too. In the business section of the app store, there are three pages of apps that include everything from virtual rolodexes to time trackers to expense recorders and various calculators. There are even IT-focused apps like VNC clients and command prompt tools. Yet, there could be so many more apps available here.

When you think of the types of businesses there are today, you realize that there's potential for that business category to explode with apps. It could be subdivided into numerous sections focusing on the different types of business users: sales, marketing, retail, accounting, executives, HR, IT, real estate....the list could go on and on. The LinkedIn app holds universal appeal for anyone anyone who works for a living, but more importantly, we hope that, through its adoption, developers will see the potential for building iPhone apps for business as well.