I have been a reasonably happy user of LinkedIn for over a year now connecting with other linkedin realtors, but I’m getting frustrated.
It’s not the ads. Although they did recently add (fairly badly targetted, given the available data) adverts, including some nasty flash ads and even the odd popup, that’s fine. I use Firefox and Adblock handily copes with the ugliest intrusions, and well targetted text ads are actually potentially useful. (Yes, I have bought products and services based on the text ads in Gmail. I have grown to quite like them).
It’s not actually anything about the site that’s wrong, it’s more the lack of something. What LinkedIn is missing is services. The only way to use LinkedIn is through their website. It offer no REST services, no APIs at all, and not even any Atom or RSS feeds.
This is not new news (people have complained about the lack of web services exposed by LinkedIn for ages. Cote’ has interesting thing to say about it too. into , but I’m dissapointed because of the new “Services” tab which was recently introduced…
“Oh!”, I thought. “They’ve finally seen sense and added some web services“. No such luck. It’s a list of service providers recommended by people in your network. Useful, perhaps, but not at all what I was hoping for.
It’s my data. I want to be able to access it, mash it up, draw graphs of my network and generally have fun with it. And I’m not alone. I can only just imagine the quantity of cool stuff that the world would produce within 24 hours of a REST service being introduced.
For another view, check out this post on why LinkedIn may not be such a good thing.
Have you checked out the Plaxo APIs? Just curious.
Best, Jon
Not seen Plexo. I’ll have to take a look. I know all the cool kids are supposedly using OpenBC these days too, though I’ve not looked into whether it provides and feeds or APIs yet either.
Update… I was going to make a nice little graph of my LinkedIn network this evening, but to do so would be against their user agreement: “Use of manual or automated software, devices, or other processes to “crawl” or “spider” any web pages contained in the LinkedIn website is strictly prohibited. You agree not to monitor or copy, or allow others to monitor or copy, our web pages or the content included herein.”
Sigh.
I have yet to be convinced by Plaxo. The REST API looks hopeful, so I may have to try it.
Oh, and it looks like OpenBC (soon to be renamed to XING for some reason) does not yet provide an API, but plans to add one soon.