LinkedIn has announced today that they will be opening up full access to their new platform for building the professional web. There is much talk across the blogosphere about how Google, Facebook, and Twitter are building and extending the social web, but not much about the professional web. This is LinkedIn’s niche and, while the site itself is not a huge draw, a set of tools for integrating professional profiles across the web could be very powerful.
With this release, we’re including a powerful set of plugins, to further help bring professional identity & insights into your application. For example, you can show your visitors who they know in a professional context with the Member Profile plugin, and display rich personalized insights about companies featured on your site with the Company Insider plugin.
Available plugins include:
- Sign In with LinkedIn, which makes it easier for users to authenticate or register for your site using their LinkedIn identity
- Share, a button which enables users to share your website with LinkedIn’s professional audience
- Member Profile, which brings LinkedIn profiles to your site
- Full Member Profile, which brings larger, more detailed LinkedIn profiles to your site
- Company Profile, which displays key company info at-a-glance
- Company Insider, which shows rich company data from several different views
- Recommend, a button which enables users to recommend your products and drive traffic back to you
While the platform provides deep integration with LinkedIn geared towards developers, it’s also easy to use for those with no coding experience whatsoever. The goal is to give developers and publishers alike a “featherweight” way to “light up your site and increase engagement.” For example, here is all you need to include the Member Profile plugin on your site:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js"></script>
<script type="IN/MemberProfile" data-id="http://www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman" data-related="false" data-format="inline"></script>
For more details on how to dig into the professional web and integrate LinkedIn on your site or into your web apps, check out developer.linkedin.com. They’ve created quick start content, including script generators that allow you to “visually configure and deploy your plugin of choice.” According to LinkedIn, this is only the tip of the iceberg and they are asking for feedback on what’s available so far.
What do you think? Will LinkedIn integration engage a different type of visitor? Will you be implementing this on your site?
via ReadWriteWeb source LinkedIn Blog