(Updated June 28, see below. I will continue adding links to other discussions of this topic at the bottom of this posting.)
Mashable.com, a social networking news site, reports that LinkedIn is going to follow in the footsteps of Facebook. The site says LinkedIn will provide users with the opportunity to customize their profiles with a variety of different programs, built by third-party developers. This will entail making available so-called open APIs - "application programming interfaces" - that let the site use information from other applications (computer programs written by third-party developers). Facebook added this capability in the last couple of months and the site's growth rate has increased accordingly.
realizing it could lose its dominant position in business networking if it doesn’t act, founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman said on Friday that LinkedIn will provide open APIs “within 9 months”. Most likely, it’ll be much sooner (and it’ll need to be - 9 months is a long, long time on the web).
From a business standpoint, this is probably a necessary move. From a usability standpoint, it will probably make LinkedIn's relatively spartan profiles look more like other sites. I'm sure the very first module provided will be one that lets you display your photo, or leave messages on the site for other users.
More broadly, this move may provide organizations that use LinkedIn for Groups, such as alumni associations, with tools that help them manage and measure their groups' performance. As I wrote here in May, LinkedIn provides almost no useful metrics about groups' members or their networking behavior.
Group sponsors want more info about how alumni are using LinkedIn and whether it's working. Will we get that info? Fingers crossed.
UPDATE:
After (literally) sleeping on this posting after writing it late last night, it occurs to me that metrics about our alumni in these social network sites need not depend on formal alumni groups. Almost every member of Facebook has the View Friends feature enabled (it's the default). I can view your friends as a global group, or by "network" (such as your college or university). So finding out how many of a user's friends are from the same alumni association is literally three clicks - and ten seconds - away in Facebook. This network-centric search for your connections should be enabled someday in LinkedIn, even in the absence of official groups.
Another way for us to start learning about our alumni and their uses of these networking sites.
Mario Sundar's "LinkedIn Community Evangelist" posting about this topic
Download Squad's more skeptical treatment of the same topic
TechCrunch provides its take on the LinkedIn plans
Scott Allen discusses why people switch social network sites
