It is obvious that the site/company is having P.R. problems – almost every blog with any sort of negative observation by the site is garnering responses from [supposed] actual LinkedIn employees. Hell, one of the “founders”, Konstantin Guericke, even responded on http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000703.html?r=8700#endcomments. That, my friends, is called “damage control”. Try posting some nasty stuff about, say, “Google” (another company with, um, “issues”) and see how necessary they feel it is to have their employees/founder(s) respond… Good luck with that.

Before too awful long, the only revenue they’ll be pulling are auto-billed corporate subscriptions from idiotic H.R. managers too lazy/stupid to realize they’re being charged annually. You know those types of corporate tards – the ones that [still] pay money to have Microsoft regularly mail them MSDN materials on physical media because nobody ever gets around to reviewing the expenditures.

What people don’t seem to realize [or, worse, care about?] is that the information they are giving away for FREE is quite valuable. Just watch…when LinkedIn [hopefully] goes through bankruptcy, that data will go to the highest bidder. So much for privacy.

On #6, we do talk with Plaxo to make sure we resolve conflicts in our plug ins, if you choose to use them. We’ve worked positively with them in the past and will continue to. And it might be interesting to integrate our services a bit more, but we’d look to you to tell us what you need there. If you get any brilliant thoughts, certainly let us know.

Lucian

Wow, first, let me say thanks to you and LinkedIn for reading my little rant. I understand you being overly careful and would expect it. Here are my thoughts on API. These are the ones I would like to see sorted by my personal order of appearance.

1: Profiles of others. (Information they have made public)
2: Contacts of my 2nd Degree contact when they have made them available to me. I understand and respect that it’s not my data, I’m only asking for information that is already available to me via the web site. In my profile, I have 101 contacts and 100 have allowed me to see new, shared and non-shared contact names. Since all I get is their name and LinkedIn profile ID, I can use it to start evaluating my network but can’t really use it for spamming or anything else since even in the profile, that information is not released. (and let me say that I really like how you guys protect people’s data)
3: Send invitation. Ok, this one would require a login so you would have to create a login API. I’d love to be able to add a checkbox on some forms “Add me to your LinkedIn Network”. Now this one will be controversial because it can be abused. However, I think it opens up some interesting situations and you guys are already doing it with the Outlook toolbar.
4: Update my information. Yes, I’m lazy. I’d like to have a single place where I can update my information and then have it notify LinkedIn that things have changed.
5: Callbacks for events. Ok, this one is a bit esoteric and I may not have the use for it that I think I do but any event that happens on linked in (i.e. I send a message and it’s making it way through the system) it would be nice to be able to register a callback URL. The callback could provide something like a unique message ID and the new state. So if I sent a message that had to go through 3 people, each person’s decision would trigger a callback. IMHO, this would allow me to potentially tie LinkedIn into my CRM and use my network, where acceptable, for customer contact.
6: Ok, this one isn’t an API request but a feature request. How about tying into Plaxo. I use LinkedIn for my network but Plaxo for my address book. It would be nice to have the two of you play nice together. I’m fuzzy on how this would all work but it would be nice if you guys at least opened a dialog. Bonus points if you help each other test your outlook plugins so they don’t conflict with each other. (They don’t for me at the moment but I have a small network)

Thanks again for reading the post and bothering to post. You guys just got a couple of Karma points from me for keeping track about what is being said about you and responding kindly.

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Sorry, but a bunch of us have read it! And I am responding.

First things first: it is your data. I’m glad we basically feel the same way about that. LinkedIn hosts your data, adds it to our network engine, and tries really hard not to abuse your trust throughout the process. There is some concern in the comments here, but LinkedIn doesn’t sell your network contact information. That’s important.

On to the APIs. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the APIs we can provide. I’ll post some thoughts here, but was glad to read yours as well.

Overall, I suspect that there are a great number of people and companies that want to see public profiles of people in LinkedIn who have allowed their public profile to be visible. That seems a natural place to start. For example, a blogger writing about someone can include the LinkedIn public profile of the person. It can be done today, but we can make that a lot easier.

After that, it seems valuable to look at your network relationships and see how much of that we can open in an API. There are some important issues there, though. We already let you download your first degree contacts: as you say, its your data. But second degree and third degree contacts are not your data. Those contacts belong to the people in your first degree network, not to you. So, we will be very careful if we open an API to that information. We simply have to be careful not to violate anyone’s trust here.

I know it seems overly careful, but its this kind of care with your relationships that has made LinkedIn a very trusted environment.

So, we’re talking about how we can open this information up, but there are definitely some rules we won’t violate.

What else would you like to see opened? What would you do with it? Could opening our job listings make job hunting any easier?

Lucian Beebe
Product management
LinkedIn

Beyond that, it boils down to it’s my data, not theirs. I should be able to do whatever I want with it. By locking it up in their silo, they are making the service less appealing to me.

No, I didn’t change anything. However, I am considering re-writing it to use WebThumb (http://bluga.net/webthumb/index.php) The way I see it working is the first time someone views a post, it creates thumbnails for all the links and archives them locally. Then you don’t have to rely on Alexa.

Maybe I’ll trigger on publish instead. If you had more than a couple of links on a post, it might take a while to get them all generated.

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