Web 2.0

LinkedIn is a social network for professionals. More like an online resume, the website lets users interact with professional contacts which could lead to new employment leads and greater professional collaboration.

Almost an year back LinkedIn had started treading along the same path as Facebook with the announcement of its Intelligent Application Platform. The purpose of the platform was to make available access to Linked In from several other websites and now the recently announced applications that will be part of the users profile.

The Nine Applications that would be available are from:

• Amazon : A Reading list to share books with others in the network.
• Box.net : Application to manage files online.
• Google : Integration with Google Presentation to include presentation slides in your profile.
• Huddle : Online workspace for collaboration.
• Six Apart : Application to link your blogs to your profile.
• SlideShare : Sharing Presentation from Slideshare.
• Tripit : To know and share your travel plans with your network.
• WordPress : Another blogging platform application.
• Company Buzz : A linked In application to receive information on companies you are interested in.

What sets LinkedIn’s approach apart from Facebook’s Application Strategy is the way they are introducing applications with well defined utility from the professional perspective. This also means that the applications would be highly tried and tested.

The applications are intended to provide more functionality to users to portray their professional tastes. In times of growing distress in the job market, web sites oriented to help users find new opportunities will gain popularity. And LinkedIn’s recent announcement is well timed for that.

Much has been said about the Semantic Web and how it would make possible a whole new generation of applications that can provide utilities based on the connections between data. Twine, developed by Radar Networks based in San Francisco, is a new service that puts to work technologies that delve into the content that a user is interested, providing suggestions and also aiding in organizing this information.

An excerpt from Technology Review:

Twine uses artificial intelligence–machine learning and natural language processing–to parse the contents of Web pages and extract key concepts, such as people, places, and organizations, from the pages that a user saves. The site then uses these concepts to link information and users. For example, creating a twine–a bundle of bookmarks related to a particular topic–devoted to a specialized technique in computer game design quickly led to the discovery of twines (created by other users) devoted to other areas of game design and to twines devoted to a popular game that uses the technique. It also led to other users interested in the subject. Twine is also meant to automatically generate tags, descriptions, and summaries of bookmarked Web pages.

All the real hard technologies are working in the background. The caveat here is that users have to collaborate to let the system learn about the categorization for topics.

“Website owners can make any site social!” This is the claim of Google with it up and coming service, Friend Connect, which aims to aid in adding social features to a website without any programming involved.

Google’s director of engineering David Glazer described Friend Connect as plumbing for the rest of the web. “The Web is getting better by getting more social. We’ve baked social features into the infrastructure of the Web, and it is not tied to any particular site,” Glazer said. “Users can interact with any of their friends anywhere they go on Web, and with any app.”

As declared by Google in their Press Center, websites that are not social networks can still be social through Friend Connect. But with only a preview page to contain people’s excitement, many people still wonder as to how exactly would Friend Connect work.

Connecting With Friend Connect

Google’s Friend Connect needs to, of course, connect to your website for exchange of applications. Designed to keep you in charge of your website’s data, Friend Connect can link your website to social networks. However, Google prevented being compared to spamming malware by stating that they will “never store social graph data from other sites, and we never pass users’ social network IDs to Friend Connected sites or applications.”

Fears at rest, let’s explore what Friend Connect will allow us to do with our websites in the near future.

1. Google Friend Connect puts users in control over whether they’re connected to their data on Facebook.
2. Google Friend Connect only reads a small amount of user data from Facebook, and does so using Facebook’s public APIs. We read the Facebook numeric id, friendly name, and public photo URLs of the user and their friends. We read no other information.
3. The only user information that we pass from Facebook to third-party applications is the URL of the user’s public photo.
4. Google Friend Connect does not permanently store any user data retrieved from Facebook.

For more updates on these four, you can check out “How Google Friend Connect Works” by Peter Chane, Sami Shalabi, Mussie Shore.

Will people buy what Friend Connect promised to shell out? I really don’t know, because there are more and more about this application network being doubted by many.

First, it doesn’t really secure a user’s content for the user, so the control factor becomes somewhat questionable.

Second, Google relations to popular application-based websites like Facebook are still shaky that launching the whole Friend Connect service might just end up a flop.

Third (and the last for now), I don’t think that it would be easy squeezing all of those user data and chosen apps into that small iFrame. I mean, what happened to the simple read-write-execute trio?

Forcing all three on an app in that small iFrame, not to mention the multitudes of applications that the user would want in that iFrame, would spell out complexity for me. So much for interconnecting the web in an easy format, don’t you think?