Friday, October 31, 2008

LinkedIn to Launch New Platform Featuring InApps

Posted by Katie Noonan:

According to an article by Business Week’s Tech Beat blogger, Rob Hof, LinkedIn will soon follow in Facebook’s footsteps by offering a new InApps (Social Networkese for Intelligent Applications) platform to its 5.5 million users.

For those of you wondering if your Facebook bumper stickers will transfer over, not so fast. Just as LinkedIn is a more professional, grown-up, social networking site, so too are its new applications, according to Jamie Templeton, LinkedIn’s vice-president of platform products. LinkedIn’s new platform will focus more on utility than entertainment value, and at the outset, it will only offer about a dozen applications versus Facebook’s thousands.

Some of the more notable applications are Google Presentations, for users to share recent presentations with LinkedIn contacts, a Wordpress application for users to sync their blog to their LinkedIn profile, and Company Buzz, an application which will allow LinkedIn users to keep up with what people are saying about their company on Twitter.

According to Templeton, all InApps will be in Beta version at the launch of the new platform, so there may be a few kinks to work out, but the new platform has the potential to really optimize LinkedIn users’ networking capabilities.

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