41998c09.qxd:Blogging Heroes
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126 Web 2.0 Heroes professional networks that they’ve built up. We’ve spent the last three years making sure that people could connect and reconnect and re-establish their offline professional network online. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of that; we’re 17 million members as of now, and as of this month, we’re growing at 1.1 million professionals every month. Recently, we had more professionals joining than there are seconds in the day, which is incredible! That’s been our past, but our future is very much about enabling you to make better, more effective use of your professional network, in more of your daily tasks. With that context in mind, we’re doing a few things. First, we’re enabling people to access their LinkedIn network anywhere on the Web, and take action with it. Let me give you an example: On Business Week, you’ll be able to read an article about a particular company, and then right there, you’ll be able to access your LinkedIn network, find out who you know in that company or how many degrees away you are from someone you want to know in that company. You will then be able to take action on that article—whether you want to do a deal with them, work for them, research them, or whatever it might be. You can find a company insider on any article that’s been written. That’s an example of LinkedIn’s API strategy being about giving you access to your network so that you can actually make use of it anywhere on the Web. That’s very different from the Facebook approach, which requires people to build things on Facebook and the end user to be on Facebook exclusively. That’s part of our API approach—being able to combine publishers’ content with Web 2.0 sort of network of people technology that LinkedIn has.
“Web 2.0…[makes] that whole process a lot more precise.”
The second part is that we will be doing the kind of Facebook approach in terms of having third-party application providers and publishers launch applications on LinkedIn, but again, we’re 100 percent professional—that’s all we do. We won’t be letting just anybody launch things; we’ll do so on a very selective basis. We were recently talked about for Google’s Open Social platform. Our role in that will be to partner with proven publishers and proven productivity application providers to use Open Social, use some of the LinkedIn APIs and to then build applications that millions of professionals can use on LinkedIn. The one that we demo is based on what your profile says about