LinkedIn over the past few months has expanded upon its offerings with first enabling websites to offer user sign-ups via their LinkedIn account and then partnering with Janrain Engage to allow users to publish comments, reviews, purchases, blogs, downloads, etc to their LinkedIn profile as a status update. Users welcomed the ability to sign in, comment and share articles, blogs, etc with their connections to start some sensational discussions. The popularity and increase in user activity that brings them back to the LI site, has prompted LinkedIn to enhance the offerings with Janrain Engage through the new ShareAPI.
The New LinkedIn ShareAPI
The new released on September 1, 2010, provides developers full access to shared items, comments, likes and shares of shared items (reshares per LinkedIn).According to Adam Trachtenberg, LinkedIn’s Director of Developer Network,
Recently, we introduced a feature allowing you to share articles, including your personal take on the pieces. Another member can comment on and “like” what you shared. You can comment back. And then a third person can jump in.
After this launched, we’ve seen a great increase in network activity and vibrancy, as our members become more engaged with relevant information to do their jobs. We’re making it easy to mash up LinkedIn information, such as member profiles, with everything going on on the Internet, such as hot blog posts, trending news, and simply cool stuff.
As of today, you now have full API access to shared items, along with reshares, comments, and likes. Now:
- News sites and blogs can let people share articles directly from their site
- Social aggregators can display the articles shared by a person’s network, and they can comment and like them inline
- Member profile widgets can retrieve a person’s latest share
- Applications can let members can reshare articles with their network, passing along the story to a new audience.
Janrain Engage for LinkedIn
The new ShareAPI has provided Janrain Engage greater access to a user’s LinkedIn profile data. This information, available for analysis via your Janrain Engage dashboard, provides data about your connections so you can better target them through shared content. Janrain Engage is not limited to LinkedIn as Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, etc users can also sign in and the data will be tracked. The company prides it self on the “…ability to build deeper, more valuable relationships with their users as they connect their online presence.”
Janrain Engage has three plans available, the basic which is free, the Plus which is relatively inexpensive at $100 per year and the Pro at $1000 per year and is easily downloaded via a plugin for WordPress.
photo credit: m
