The New LinkedIn Platform: Help Build the Professional Web
Today, we are very happy to announce that we are opening up full access to LinkedIn's new platform for building the professional web. — In October, LinkedIn announced early access to a new Javascript platform to help make integrating LinkedIn faster and more powerful.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is LinkedIn's second act as a platform. In December 2007 it opened an early API alongside a homepage redesign (platform launch and redesign), but integration stayed limited; last October it began early access to a new JavaScript platform, and today full public access follows —ReadWriteWeb reads it directly as LinkedIn's answer to Facebook's Open Graph.
The timing matters: three weeks ago LinkedIn crossed 100 million members, and it is widely reported to be preparing an IPO — Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and JPMorgan are named as underwriters, and SharesPost auctions put shares at $30 apiece, implying near-$3 billion. Opening the platform converts that member base from a destination site into a distributable identity layer right as the company faces public-market scrutiny.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers can now embed LinkedIn sign-in, profile data and network actions on their own sites via the JavaScript platform, making LinkedIn's professional graph usable outside linkedin.com without bespoke integrations.
- Publishers and app builders gain a one-line route to 'professional context' — the ReadWriteWeb framing is that LinkedIn is now competing for the same third-party-site real estate where Facebook's Open Graph already operates.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's Open Graph faces a differentiated challenger: where social-graph integrations optimize for sharing and entertainment, a professional-graph equivalent targets résumés, hiring tools and B2B services, forcing sites to choose which identity layer to embed — or both.
- With an IPO reportedly pending, the platform move gives LinkedIn a growth story beyond subscriptions and job listings, which underwriters and public investors will read as evidence the network effect extends past the destination site.
Third-order effects
- If professional identity consolidates around LinkedIn the way social identity consolidated around Facebook Connect, the company's leverage shifts from owning traffic to charging for access to verified professional data — the durable position in the stack.
- The pattern generalizes: networks that reach critical mass convert member trust into platform infrastructure, and regulators' eventual questions about who controls professional identity follow from whoever wins that layer.
The trend: Social networks are competing to become embedded identity layers across the web, and LinkedIn is staking the professional graph as its claim on that infrastructure.