Following the lead of Twitter, Facebook and others, LinkedIn – the social network for professionals – is opening up its application program interface (API) so that developers can create third party applications that integrate with LinkedIn’s network.

LinkedIn is releasing 11 different APIs, which fall into three different categories:

1. An API that lets developers create applications that allows people to easily access their information, profiles, connections and messages via oAuth login.
2. An API that allows developers to create apps that enable people to take actions on their LinkedIn information, such as messaging their LinkedIn contacts, posting updates, accept contacts and so on.
3. An API that enables developers to embed LinkedIn search in other applications. Apparently, LinkedIn search is hot, handling over one billion queries already in 2009.

LinkedIn’s vice president of search and platform products, Adam Nash, told TechCrunch that LinkedIn had received around 4,000 requests from developers to integrate LinkedIn with their applications. Further, according to Adam, LinkedIn regards the release of these APIs as the initial step toward becoming “an open ecosystem” and has plans to release further APIs in the future.

Source: Leena Rao, “An Ecosystem Is Born: LinkedIn Opens Up API,” TechCrunch, November 23, 2009

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