An Overview of LinkedIn Applications

Business & Social Networking Tools for Professionals & Entrepreneurs

Dec 1, 2008 Terence P Ward

With the release of its first applications, LinkedIn seeks to position itself as the place where businesses use the tools of social networking to connect and interact.

LinkedIn is a business-oriented social networking site that strives to use interactive Web 2.0 tools to make it easier for users to make job connections, develop professional relationships, and network with potential vendors and clients. The site rolled out its first nine applications in late October, 2008 in an attempt to better capitalize on the success of such social networking giants as Facebook.

Applications are programs hosted on the internet that allow users of the site to share information in new ways. Of the nine that were included in the initial rollout, four are designed to facilitate online collaboration and two increase blog distribution. All of the initial offerings are free to use.

Online Collaboration

Four of the first nine LinkedIn applications focus on improving or facilitating online collaboration among “connections,” as network members on the site are called. Collaboration software generally permits documents to be hosted remotely and worked on by all members of a group, and also facilitates swift communication about a project. The LinkedIn collaboration applications are:

• Huddle Workspaces, focusing on shared documents and updates via RSS
• Box.net, which permits featuring of “key documents directly on your profile.”
• SlideShare, an application specifically for sharing presentations with connections
• Google Presentations, which capitalizes on the internet company’s free online Google Docs.

Blog Distribution

Business blogs are most successful when they gain exposure, and two of the applications included in the initial LinkedIn launch are designed with that in mind. Since the advent of Really Simple Syndication it is much easier to submit new blog posts to sites that collect and distribute them. These two applications syndicate blogs directly to a LinkedIn profile so they appear on the page of all connections.

• Blog Link, created by SixApart, automatically updates with new posts from any website on the user’s profile that has RSS feed capability.
• WordPress is designed specifically to link blogs made in the popular format of the same name, and offers methods to filter the displayed posts, as well.

Other Applications

The other three initial offerings are:

• Amazon Reading List, which allows users to share books.
• Company Buzz, which monitors RSS for a specific company to allow the user to monitor the “chatter” about his or her own company.
• My Travel, an application that tracks the planned trips of other connections to facilitate face-to-face business networking.

LinkedIn evaluates each new application proposal for its site before approving it, unlike social networking sites MySpace and Facebook, both of which have a completely open platform for development.

The copyright of the article An Overview of LinkedIn Applications in Internet is owned by Terence P Ward. Permission to republish An Overview of LinkedIn Applications in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

Use LinkedIn to network on the web