LinkedIn to open up to developers
I talked to LinkedIn founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman on Friday at the Supernova 2007 conference about Facebook's rapid growth and potential incursion into his territory. He told me that over next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook spent the second week of June 2007 turning its network into an application platform: it opened its API to third-party developers on June 15, hosted a New York developer meetup drawing eager app builders, and launched its F8 platform on June 22 — with one longtime monthly user reporting they now check the site daily and run multiple apps. The confirmed read among observers was that Facebook's growth posed a potential incursion into LinkedIn's professional-networking territory.
Hoffman's answer came on stage at Supernova 2007: LinkedIn will deliver developer APIs over the next nine months. The pickup was real if modest — All Facebook ran 'LinkedIn Opening Platform' and Scripting News asked whether LinkedIn would truly open — but the substance is a defensive platform commitment from the one large social network whose graph is professional rather than personal.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn commits to shipping developer APIs within nine months, giving third parties programmatic access to a professional-identity graph for the first time.
Second-order effects
- App builders who flocked to Facebook's F8 launch gain a second, business-focused distribution surface — and other social networks, widely expected (though unconfirmed) to scramble in response to Facebook's open API, now have a rival precedent for opening up.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, competition among social networks shifts from feature sets to how open each platform's API is, with professional data emerging as a distinct programmable asset alongside the consumer social graph.
The trend: Social networks are racing to open developer APIs in response to Facebook's F8 platform, with each network's data type defining its own developer ecosystem.