No confirmations yet as of this writing, but the idea of LinkedIn opening up their platform to developers is not far from happening.
With Facebook enabling developers to create applications for their network a month ago, LinkedIn is expected to follow suit. Yup, you got it right. Facebook and LinkedIn — an unlikely competition to watch out for. Vallywag has already commented on this, anticipating a battle between the two networking giants:
On the surface, the two couldn’t be any more different: Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has only recently expanded beyond college students; and Linked In is a tool for recruiters, job seekers, sales execs and other corporate drones. But Facebook’s interface is sufficiently clean, and efficient, that it’s attracting a new class of user, the professional.
True enough, the LinkedIn VS Facebook battle is looming in the horizon. (Or, has it already began?)
With about 11 million members to date, increasing with 180,000 new members each week, Dan Nye, LinkedIn’s CEO, is confident that LinkedIn will own the business networking. He said, “people will most likely have a social network for personal purposes, and another for professional and business-related connections. After the inevitable social net shakeout, Facebook and MySpace will remain standing and will compete to supply an outlet for personal self-expression and community. Meanwhile, LinkedIn will dominate the business of business networking — serving as a productivity tool used for professional reference checking, recruiting, and to get expert advice.”
But what if you can have both your personal and business contacts all in one platform? Interestingly, more and more professionals now are using Facebook to invite business contacts and create professional networks — a territory that supposedly has LinkedIn’s name on it. And with more possible developments being considered to upgrade Facebook’s platform, the logical thing for LinkedIn to do is to open up to new development strategies as well and catch up.
Two things that could happen in the next few weeks, or months: (1) LinkedIn to deploy itself as an application on Facebook; or (2) The two networks to take on the virtual battle. Let’s wait and see.
Originally posted on June 26, 2007 @ 5:20 am
Who want to pay to contact people on linkedin? I know lots of folks building profiles on a site called congoo.com becuase you can contact others members free.
I’m on both Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook’s service is so much better it’s not even funny. I fined LinkedIn to be clunky and user unfriendly … They even try to charge for some services!
However, to complicate matters, I do find LinkedIn to be more useful. Just because I don’t have much time for social networking, but if I’m going to make time, it’s nice to be helping out my career.
I don’t think LinkedIn can become a social network the way Facebook operates. Their whole business model and current application are just not open for it. There is no collaboration on LinkedIn, just connections. And to communicate outside your own connections you will need to pay. Facebook still lacks the focus on professionals and their specific needs. Ning has a better way to setup communities, but also lacks tools for organizations or people that want to run a professional community. I run my community on http://www.konnects.com. It is a mix of Ning and LinkedIn and great for professionals. It is free, but you can make money on your own community.
You made some decent points there. I searched on the web for the difficulty and found most individua