ReadWriteWeb

LinkedIn, the holy grail for widget developers seeking to prove their software is serious, has taken some interesting steps towards a more social future in the release of some new features and discussion of their forthcoming API this morning. While some of what was announced is very cool, I'm not sure how ready the business world is for widgets. I've still got my fingers crossed for the future, but today's news hasn't gotten me very excited yet.

First, the Good News

This is something we've really been looking forward to, there's so much potential here. The best thing that LinkedIn announced today is a cool new partnership with BusinessWeek. You'll now be able to hover over peoples' names in stories on the BW site and see how you're connected to them via LinkedIn. That's awesome. The news site will also offer a social bookmarking button to share an article just with your network of contacts. That's mildly interesting. Both of these features have some real potential and should be rolled out to more sites soon.

LinkedIn also announced its newsfeed today and a new reading list that will highlight the most popular articles around the web among your contacts. There's no Beacon action here, it's just for articles visited by clicking through links in LinkedIn. In other words, it's not worth much yet. Add the ability to import your APML profile and get recommendations and then we're really talking.

Finally, modules on the newly designed home page can be moved around by drag and drop. As Allen Stern at CenterNetworks pointed out, if LinkedIn partnered with an existing startpage, embraced this paradigm whole-hog and became a destination site - then things might really change.

For now, I find all of the above (except the Business Week pop-up profiles) rather uninspiring. If that's the good news, let's talk about the bad news, shall we?