LinkedIn for BlackBerry: Anytime, Anywhere
I'm Chad Whitney, the Product Manager responsible for mobile products at LinkedIn. This is my first blog post for LinkedIn, so why not kick things off with a bang? I'm excited to announce the full release of LinkedIn for BlackBerry v1.0.
Context & Ripple Effects
LinkedIn has been building toward this release for over two years: the LinkedIn News launch and homepage redesign of December 2007 marked its push beyond a static profile page, and a confirmed January 2010 update focused specifically on helping users find, organize and stay in touch with business connections. A native BlackBerry client is the distribution piece of that same arc.
The timing matters because of where BlackBerry stood in early 2010: the company had published its official OS 5.0 upgrade list in October 2009, and live images of an unconfirmed Slider device — speculated to be a Storm successor — surfaced in February 2010. LinkedIn shipping v1.0 now ties its product to the installed base most likely to receive those updates: corporate-issued handsets.
First-order effects
- BlackBerry-carrying professionals gain anytime, anywhere access to their LinkedIn network without touching a desktop, closing the gap between how they use email and how they use their professional graph.
Second-order effects
- Rival professional-networking services now face pressure to field native BlackBerry clients of their own, since the device dominates corporate mail fleets and LinkedIn has claimed that surface first.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the smartphone becomes the primary maintenance surface for professional relationships rather than the occasional desktop session, rewarding whichever network ships the best native client on each dominant enterprise platform.
The trend: Professional networking is shifting from scheduled desktop sessions to always-on mobile clients, with native apps on enterprise-dominant platforms like BlackBerry becoming the battleground for business users' attention.