ReadWriteWeb

Professional social network LinkedIn has opened up access to a new developer platform today that should bring LinkedIn content, buttons, Twitter-esque "profile summaries" and more to websites throughout the Web.

The platform, though, isn't just for developers. LinkedIn is offering an entire suite of plugins to bring all of this content to your website. Even better, it's making it as easy as the click of a button and it could offer some serious competition to Facebook's Open Graph on sites that cater to the career-minded.

Technologists have spent nearly 20 years now predicting the future of the Web. And while the Web is not dead yet, how we use it and our expectations of it are surely changing. We want what we want exactly when and where we want it. And when we don't get it, we don't hesitate taking our business - or eyeballs - elsewhere.

This has led more technologists including myself to start thinking about how the Web needs to evolve to keep up with user expectations. People hold companies to impossibly high expectations to deliver extremely personalized experiences as they browse, shop, learn and play on the Web.

Klout, a high-profile startup offering technology to rank the influence of Twitter users, announced tonight that it has hired Philip Hotchkiss as the company's Chief Product Officer. Hotchkiss previously lead BigCharts.com, a financial information provider that sold to Market Watch for $166 million.

Klout data is valuable because marketers, PR people and others want a way to quickly prioritize which Twitter users they should respond to among many mentions of a monitored brand. Twitter is uniquely well-suited to programatic analysis of topical influencers, as it is rich with interlinked, publicly accessible user profiles.

Today, there are more than one million Facebook developers. Many of these developers in this community are relatively new to Web services and APIs. They represent a new generation of what Gartner calls "citizen developers," a group that by 2014 will create 25% of all business applications.

Apigee is a platform for managing APIs. The service is built on the premise that developers need the tools to develop APIs but they also increasingly need more ways to understand the services they are integrating.

In that vein, Apigeee has just launched a new service that provides developers with guidance for how to navigate the new Graph API from Facebook.

A survey conducted by the blog Inside Facebook has uncovered some interesting statistics about advertisements on the popular social networking site and how users react to them. Surprisingly, according to the results of the survey, the majority of Facebook users either like or are neutral about the presence of ads on the site, as only 40.3% said they dislike the ads. What did these users say are the most disliked products advertised on the site? Online dating services.

Twitter is testing a new feature tonight that will provide users with a widget in the profile sidebar which displays mutual follows. According to a status posted by Twitter developer Nick Kallen, 10% of users now see a "You both follow" section on user profiles that will showcase a handful of users that are followed by both that profile and the user visiting it. So if user A follows B, and user C follows B, then B will show up in this section when user A visits user C's profile.

Today, Twitter took the wraps off a new feature of the site. When logging in, it prompts the user to set defaults on being discovered with their email address or mobile phone number. It's called "Be Found on Twitter". Our contact at Twitter told us that, like many new features, this will show up for some users today and others soon.

Up to this point, Twitter allows people to create a persona for themselves that may not be directly correlated to the real world. You can't do that on Facebook (assuming that you're following the terms and conditions).

Last fall Google began experimenting with a new feature called Social Search, and we called it a big chess move against Facebook. Today Google Social Search is opening up in beta for all Google users. The experimental feature will surface search results from the social streams (bookmarks, blog posts, photos, etc.) of a user's contacts on services like Gmail, Google Reader or Twitter.

Social Search still doesn't have a super-prominent place in the Google Search results pages, but make no mistake: This is a very big step. What's your portal to the Internet: Google's algorithmic search of the Web at large, or your social circle of people on Facebook? That's the battle for the future that Google and Facebook are waging now, and Google Social Search is a big move. Facebook search is nowhere near as good.

The very notion of data silos seems to be turning upside down and sideways and shaken all around. A whole new generation of applications are infiltrating the enterprise and bringing out a new dimension of intelligence not previously explored.

The future of search almost certainly involves social networks, social graphs, or social filtering in some capacity. Companies will live or die by whether they get the "social" part right: creating the right level of intimacy, trust, reliability, social connectedness, and accuracy in their results listings. Of course, this specifically means that their user experience must at least meet or, preferably, exceed that of Google's.

To achieve this, we must first stop arguing over the different flavors of search.