Culture

LinkedIn Opens Its API to the World

by Truemorist | November 23, 2009 at 12:20 pm

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LinkedIn (Facebook for Grown-ups) has opened up its API for developers to cook up new interfaces with everything from Facebook to third-party Twitter clients. This will probably expose LinkedIn to a whole new audience. So far, LinkedIn has been its own little isolated ecosystem: The Nomanisan Island of the Internet.

I wonder why LinkedIn hasn't done this earlier. They've been like FIFA refs: pretending a piece of technology doesn't exist, even when it would make everyone's lives easier. Now you can try to poach a potential employee at the drop of a hat: the denizens of the constantly-churning tech consultancy world must be thrilled, and with good reason.

Developers have wanted to step up to LinkedIn for quite some time:

LinkedIn’s VP of search and platform products, Adam Nash, told me that over the past year, the network has received 4,000 requests from developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications.

Better late than never, though.

While LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, they fall into three distinct categories. First, developers will be able to let users easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login. The second functionality is to give users the ability to make actionable decisions about information, but letting them message their LinkedIn contacts, post updates, accept contacts and more. And the third piece of the puzzle is search.