LinkedIn announced today that it’s adding the ability to add custom applications to your profile page. It’s based on the OpenSocial application development platform.

OpenSocial didn’t take off nearly as fast as I thought it would. I had always assumed that when MySpace enabled it that adoption would pick-up rapidly. LinkedIn has now finally enabled it and I believe future tech like Google Friend Connect (which also uses OpenSocial) will really push this application platform over the top.

I installed two applications immediately. An application to quickly and easily port this blog to my profile as well an application that scans twitter with references to my company. The two apps are called Wordpress and Company Buzz respectively.

The installation was easy in terms of the number of clicks, but there were some bugs. LinkedIn didn’t acknowledge that the application was complete and the apps were only working intermittently when I viewed my profile. On the basis that I got the email they were launching this at 12.21 AM and blogged about it at 1.35 AM I’m going to cut them some slack. Hopefully it will work a bit better by the time you check it out.

If you haven’t got a LinkedIn profile yet your missing out. Social networking in the business space is equally as interesting as Facebook or MySpace. It’s just harder to pick up a date on LinkedIn…

Everyone knows that we’re very passionate about Facebook. We’ve been actively building Facebook applications since they first launched and consider them to be one of the fundamental differentiators that helped propel Facebook to such lofty heights.

Facebook embraced what I believe builds the most successful new model businesses successes on the web. They created an open platform and let user innovation drive the direction of their business. Unfortunately, like most open platforms, it got out of control. People abused their rights in an effort to push their application to the top. The constant stream of invitations to join applications became one of the number one gripes of Facebook users as they felt they were being aggressively “spammed” (even if it was by their friends).

Facebook has been re-evaluating it’s infrastructure quite a bit these days. A new Facebook layout, for better or worse, has been released. Additionally they have been making some heavy changes to how applications were handled within the system beyond the presentation layer.

The obvious change that you would have noticed includes shifting all of your applications mini-views to a tab on your profile called “Boxes”. Really? They couldn’t name it “applications” or “apps” so it was even mildly intuitive. It’s bad enough that they’re now treating the application concept they popularized as the ugly step-child, but this is just adding insult to injury. I wish they made the tab name “don’t click here” - it would probably get more people to check it out.

 Read More »

Social media has played a massive role in recent US politics and its influence will continue to increase over time. Although this trend permeates social networking, blogger outreach programs, and even more traditional banner ads across both of these mediums, the use of Twitter is particularly fascinating. For example, the number one position on Twitterholic.com, which tracks the most popular Twitter profiles, has belonged to Barack Obama for the past month and half.

In terms of demographic, social media is no longer something that is skewed towards the younger demographic who have traditionally had lower voter turn-outs. It now extends to the many layers of the voting demographic and even has an influence on mainstream media, which proves that it is targeting people outside of social media’s traditional reach. Indeed, social media has the capability of seeding public sentiment in real time into web properties that people visit on a daily basis, and these are typically sites that people visit more often than news sites. Personally, I believe there will be a growing and consistent trend between successful politicians and those that focus on strong internet and social media strategies.

The UK’s use of social media sites runs in parallel to the US so unique cultural differences will rarely make a difference. Indeed, it would be foolish of UK politicians not to adopt similar strategies or what’s more, create ambitious strategies that could set the trend for future US campaigns.

While most social networks struggle to sell advertising due to lack of proper segmentation and totally irrelevant content for advertisers, LinkedIn has so much demand that they decided to launch their own ad network. LinkedIn claims 27 million registered users, according to comScore, 5.2 million from the U.S. visited the site in July (8.7 million worldwide).

 Read More »