- Posted by jfarrar on May 11, 2008
I've been looking around the last couple of days at all of the announcements regarding the latest buzz word "Data Portability". It is interesting to see all of the major social players moving into the realm of data availability. This is much different then data portability, and should not be confused. Somehow it's been interpreted as the same thing. To most people it would just seem semantical, but it's really quite different.
Anyhow, it's interesting to see the competition and collaboration going on between Facebook, Plaxo, Myspace and Google in this area. You can read about facebook's platform "Facebook Connect" here. Myspace announced their platform Myspace Data Availability here. Google is planning on coming out with "Friend Connect" for OpenSocial, detailed here.
On a related note, it's ironic to see LinkedIn falling further behind the times in terms of their platform. I've really wanted to play around with their API, but it's completely closed to people that don't work for big companies. Right now they are only interested in PR. While they keep posting blogs and videos about their various integrations in to big named companies, I still have yet to see them announce (or even say for that matter) when they will open this up to developers as a whole. They have a ridiculous note at the bottom of each of these API posts that says if you are interested to contact them. However, when you do, there isn't even a generic reply sent back and I never got a reply back from a person. Logic would dictate that you have a few people dedicated to this email account, however it appears that only their lead guy gets them.
This is all well and good and I'm happy for LinkedIn. Really though, when will they learn that opening up something like this to all developers will begin to push them back into competition with the other social sites out there. Facebook has already started stealing LinkedIn users based on what I have read. Anyhow I guess this is turning into a rant so I will stop. It just frustrates me to no end when I read about an API, but it's all about PR and not really allowing developers access to use it.
On another side note. I looked around at the different LinkedIn implementations on the web. The javascript version could easily be put on any site. I tested it out from some websites I have and it worked great. They probably also have a server side API that is used by some of their partners.
Once again!
The Real JoeDeveloper
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