LinkedIn Intelligent Application Announcement: Too Little Too Late?

The folks at LinkedIn have announced a redesign and their API for developing APIs. Uh, wait a minute: they announced that months ago, didn't they? Well, I guess they are starting to know a bit more about how it will work, since they are playing nice with the Google Open Social repository.

I have lumped LinkedIn (along with Plaxo and Xing) into the "nice try, but yawn" category for so long that it was difficult to even contemplate logging in there. In fact, years ago, I asked LinkedIn to redline me, so I wouldn't even get invitations to join anymore.

Like Matthew Ingram, I think many folks who have LinkedIn accounts don't use the service actively, except when looking for a job:

[from LinkedIn and Facebook: Collision course?]

I know that many of my friends who are either looking for work or have been in the past say they get a lot out of LinkedIn, and I’m not saying it doesn’t have value — I think it does, although like my friend Mark Evans I rarely use it. It’s also good to see the network moving forward, even if most of what it is offering seems a little old (I mean, profile pictures? Come on). But the addition of things like a news aggregator for members and on-site messaging could make it more sticky.

I don't see Facebook as being threatened by LinkedIn trying to shrug off the cobwebs and get back into the battle for professional social network. It's going to have to be something better than this. Facebook doesn't have the right value proposition, yet, either, and maybe won't ever, but in the meantime they have a gazillion active users everyday and thousands of people building apps on their platform.

I like Anne Zelenka's comments:

[from LinkedIn Needs to ReachOut - GigaOM]

LinkedIn isn’t moving forward aggressively enough to unlock the value of their data and services; they need to bring them to the places where professional networking happens. “We’re taking a measured path because our audience is a professional audience,” Senior Product Director Adam Nash told me. But successful professionals know that the biggest risk you can take is to be too cautious.

Too little, and too late.