The well-known networking site LinkedIn is normally used by its members to share their professional profile, and sometimes for answering questions in the Q&A.Recently, they have started offering other services than just being an advanced and electronic curriculum vitae. Instead of trying to develop services and applications themselves, they have opened up the platform for a restricted number of applications that are used widely by professionals, such as Huddle (productivity software), Box.net (sharing documents online), and Slideshare (sharing presentations).
This is not really a surprise. Each successful social software or service (iGoogle, Facebook, iPhone, MySpace, Skype, ... etc.) uses the collective intelligence of many software developers and organizations worldwide by allowing other services run on their specific platform. These services become platforms for all kinds of different useful or funny services and thus enrich the experience and usefulness for the end-user. Meanwhile, the company, organization, or person behind the application (in many cases: individual hobbyists) has another platform for his/her services, and a much larger audience.
"LinkedIn Applications" shows you an entire page dedicated to the few services that are allowed on it. On it, you can indicate which of the services you already use, or want to use. In my case this is Slideshare, a very useful and free Internet service for sharing, viewing, using, managing, and discussing presentations (including audio). Relevant information of the Slideshare service, which you continue to use, is synchronized with the Slideshare application on LinkedIn. This means that your LinkedIn profile becomes richer by including Slideshare. In the future, LinkedIn will undoubtly allow many more professional applications on their site, if it aligns with the professional identity of the service and agrees to their terms.Allowing external services on your social networking site is not an option: it is the only way to be able to address the changing demands and make use of the full potential the Web really has. PEERS does the same, but with two notes in the margin;
- Applications need to align with the interests of the organization or users on the platform. Since we customize our software according to the needs of the client (each organization requires a different setting, service, and sometimes even language), this variable.
- Important content creation and interaction services are local services, not external services. Why? Because PEERS IMS is a learning system, and learns from the interactions and contributions of its users. If these happen on an external closed platform, the system cannot learn, and users are active without building up rich profiles. Still, in some cases we can make agreements with the external party to use their data, but these processes and agreements can be quite tedious.
