LinkedIn Restricts API Usage 69
mpicpp points out LinkedIn's new API policy. "LinkedIn is restricting access to most of its application programming interfaces (APIs) to companies that have struck up partnerships with the social networking company. 'Over the past several years, we've seen some exciting applications from our developer community. While many delivered value back to our members and LinkedIn, not all have,' wrote Adam Trachtenberg, director of the LinkedIn developer network, explaining in a blog post the change in the company's API policy. Starting May 12, LinkedIn will only offer a handful of its APIs for general use, namely those that allow users and companies to post information about themselves on the service. After then, only companies that have enrolled in LinkedIn's partner program will have API access. Samsung, WeChat, and Evernote have already struck such partnerships. Currently, the social networking service offers a wide range of APIs, which allow third-party programs to draw content from, and place content into, LinkedIn. APIs have been seen as an additional channel for businesses to interact with their users and partners. A few companies, however, have recently scaled back access to APIs, which provide the programmatic ability to access a company's services and data. Netflix shut its public API channel in November, preferring to channel its user information through a small number of partners. ESPN also disabled public access to its APIs in December. LinkedIn's move is evidence of how the business use of APIs are evolving, said John Musser, founder and CEO at API Science, which offers an API performance testing service."
Facebook for managers (Score:2)
Re:Facebook for managers (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just for managers, in fact, line managers are generally the least active contacts on LinkedIn. Unsurprisingly it seems to offer the most value to people who have to network a lot: account managers, entrepreneurs, but also consultants, freelancers, etc.
Re:How does it make money? (Score:5, Informative)
LinkedIn has 2 main income streams. The first is by selling job ads to employers. These are relatively expensive (compared to other job boards) costing $250+
The other is recurring subscriptions which give you additional features. A base account can only "see" 3rd degree connections when doing a search. When you purchase a premium account you are able to get access to the entirety of linkedin's network. This is a huge difference if you are searching for a particular skill set or position.
The other is InMails. These are direct messages that you can send directly to another user without being connected to them. Until January this year LinkedIn guaranteed a response in 7 days or you got your inmail credit back. Now they have flipped it so you get a credit back if you get a response.
A full subscription account costs c$1000 a month. It tends to be used by recruiters and internal HR people the most.
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Now they have flipped it so you get a credit back if you get a response.
Hmm.. so now I'm wondering if its better to keep ignoring those crappy job emails I keep getting to cost the recruiters when they spam me, or to respond to them to stop LinkedIn gaining revenue from my presence.
tricky one....
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If the recruiter works for an agency that has a corporate account chances are they have so many unused InMails that it doesn't matter (inmails are shared between all seat holders and you buy packs). The recruiters this has hurt are the sole operators, and frankly those are the ones you want to deal with anyway.
Personally I think it was a dodgy move because you have no way of knowing when a profile was last active but you are always charged. LinkedIn claim this will improve the quality of Inmails but I dou
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LinkedIn has 2 main income streams. The first is by selling job ads to employers. These are relatively expensive (compared to other job boards) costing $250+
That's cheaper than DICE...
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Really? I have no idea what Dice charge, wrong market and wrong location. But my average spend on job board postings was about $11 per ad depending on the site.
That said I was a volume advertiser on contract and I no longer do that as the ROI wasn't there.
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Not quite. You don't have access to contact details on that account. You can only see what their connections would see. You only get contact details when someone sends then in response to an Inmail or accepts a connection request.
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LinkedIn has 2 main income streams. The first is by selling job ads to employers. These are relatively expensive (compared to other job boards) costing $250+
The other is recurring subscriptions which give you additional features. A base account can only "see" 3rd degree connections when doing a search. When you purchase a premium account you are able to get access to the entirety of linkedin's network. This is a huge difference if you are searching for a particular skill set or position.
It also seems to be used as lead generation system. I get requests to connect from people I do not know and when I check they usually are in some business that sells products in my field, and occasionally some random person I have never heard of and probably sent the request in error. They get a simple "I don't know this person" and they go away. I started that after I accepted some invites and started to get "we have a product.." emails.
The other is InMails. These are direct messages that you can send directly to another user without being connected to them. Until January this year LinkedIn guaranteed a response in 7 days or you got your inmail credit back. Now they have flipped it so you get a credit back if you get a response.
A full subscription account costs c$1000 a month. It tends to be used by recruiters and internal HR people the most.
Sound like too many people were ignoring them and thus costing them m
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I get requests to connect from people I do not know and when I check they usually are in some business that sells products in my field...
I can't prove this, but I strongly suspect all those linkedin requests I get from unknown people are generated by robots. I closed my account recently. Say no to spam.
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Definitely used for lead generation. That was kind of what I meant by position. You can search for "Head of IT" in x region with a company of 50 or more staff.
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Definitely used for lead generation. That was kind of what I meant by position. You can search for "Head of IT" in x region with a company of 50 or more staff.
Yup, That's why when I get requests to connect from people I don't know if their profile looks like a they will be trying to sell something it gets a "I don't know this person" response.
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I get a lot of those as well. It is a really really poor method of approaching someone though. It has a terrible strike rate and doesn't differentiate you at all.
Use linkedin to identify who you want to speak to. Then pick up the phone to their business and ask for them.
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It's called making money.
Re:Facebook for managers (Score:4, Informative)
As a general rule of thumb about 40% of the workforce has a linkedin account. Depending on the industry it can be as low as 10% (hospitality) or as high as 90% (marketing). If you are in an outward facing role you will tend to have a linkedin profile.
Currently linkedin has about 330 million accounts, 100 million or so in the US.
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So, Linkedin usage has an inverse correlation with job utility.
The utility of marketing (Score:2)
You appear to imply that marketing has little utility. If you are offering a product for sale, and no one knows it exists, why are you spending what it costs to offer a product?
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Of those accounts, how many are abandoned / never checked / not real humans ? Quantcast says about half are inactive.
I tried it a decade ago, totally useless. Just people who I didn't know asking for recommendations, and the discussions were well below even slashdot's post-dice. I mean, REALLY bad. Just a bunch of wannabes and wankers spending their day trying to impress each other so that maybe possibly by chance of some act of $DIETY they'd make a contact that would actually be productive.
And the recrui
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My boss, a partner in a law firm, made me get a LinkedIn account. I did and it surprised me how many people wanted to be BFF.
I got requests to endorse people for various skills when I didn't know if they could do all that crap or not.
I got to hoping I'd found a place where IT peeps could rub elbows and talk about security, faulty updates, cool utilities for network admin, firewall tricks, and a place to swap lies.
The only dialog I was ever involved with was to fluff up other people's worth.
I waited a full y
100 Million, Really? (Score:1)
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Comes from LinkedIn themselves so no way to verify the information.
https://press.linkedin.com/abo... [linkedin.com]
The term is registered users - so anyone with 2 accounts will be counted twice.
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closes its API . How many slashdotters have a linkedin / facebook account ? just wondering ..
It's not Facebook, or at least not Facebook for standard users.
Facebook is social, although it can be used for business. LinkedIn is primarily business--basically publishing to the world some parts of your resume so that someone interested in hiring you to do a job can see that you're awesome. That, plus auto-updated list of contacts' phone numbers and emails.
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I do. LinkedIn's value is in its recommendation system.
My workplace provides a cloud-hosted portal for us worker-bees to congratulate each other. We describe a job a colleague did well, and they get a sort of "Well done!" e-card. This is meant to boost morale.
To my dismay, I found that my well-written paragraphs about colleagues' achievements basically went into a digital dustbin. All that my colleagues get is an emailed PDF 'certificate' with the title of my writeup. I don't even think their manager are no
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Don't knock it off, my last three jobs have come thanks to my LinkedIn account.
I just wish... (Score:3, Insightful)
...that bloody LinkedIn would stop spamming my mail box with fictitious contacts from people I've never had anything to do with.
Why the hell they think they have some right to use my address when I've never had anything whatsoever to do with them I don't know.
Hidden views (Score:1)
I deleted my LinkedIN account because I kept getting hidden views or whatever they call it. Normally you can see who has viewed your profile, but I would get several hits and I couldn't tell.
I had a lot of information up there, and now I'm concerned that someone linked up data from a variety of sources to steal my identity. When you think about it, you can get a few answers off of a LinkedIN profile that credit bureaus ask when accessing your profile.
In that respect, LinkedIN is worse than FaceBook - which
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Then lie. If anyone asks, you just say "oh that, I put it on to prevent identity theft, anyone claiming to be me would not have provably correct information, I always send my correct CV to employers if I apply for a job", leaving out the implicit "fool you for looking at shit on the internet and assuming it was always true".
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...that bloody LinkedIn would stop spamming my mail box with fictitious contacts from people I've never had anything to do with
Yep, that's why I closed my account. LinkedIn is first and foremost a spam delivery system.
Re: I just wish... (Score:1)
I use blacklist/whitelist on my email so i never get mail from linkedin. Just see messages whenever i sign in which is maybe 3 times a year. Totally useless site.
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But I've never had an account with them, so they must have harvested my address from somewhere else. Same as the criminals that keep trying to sell me fake blue pills perhaps?
Good way to lose business... (Score:5, Interesting)
Next time a client asks me to have a 'most recent post' from LinkedIn embedded on their web page (yes, this happens), I'll just be able to tell them that LinkedIn don't allow it.
FTA:
No, that's no typical at all. More typical would be to start charging for a previously free service. Cutting off access to a service which attracts people to your business is hardly a good way to "monetize the audience [you] have gained". It's more of a good way to lose business.
This is the decision of a dim-witted suit, and no doubt once LinkedIn realise it's a stupid move he'll be long gone with his performance bonus securely trousered.
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This is the decision of a dim-witted suit, and no doubt once LinkedIn realise it's a stupid move he'll be long gone with his performance bonus securely trousered.
No, the engineer that actually made the change under protest at the manager's direction will be fired and the manager will be promoted.
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> No, that's no typical at all. More typical would be to start charging for a previously free service.
> Cutting off access to a service which attracts people to your business is hardly a good way to
> "monetize the audience [you] have gained". It's more of a good way to lose business.
No, it's typical, in that that's what typically happens. Twitter didn't start charging, for instance; they just make it a pain for developers and users so you end up forced onto the inferior official client.
It happens
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Monetization?
Megacorps are hostile to the open Internet (Score:5, Insightful)
The Internet was founded upon the idea of open interoperation between all endpoints and federation between different instances of the same service protocol (think of SMTP and globally interoperating MTAs). These concepts were so fundamental that they are mentioned explicitly in the IETF Mission Statement as their central goal.
Then Big Business came along, and they didn't like the concept of a level playing field of unhindered interoperation and federation. Now almost every large corporation is trying to fence off their little corner of the Internet into a private realm which they guard jealously. Other companies are denied interoperation unless they pay up (or it's denied entirely), and federation between like services is virtually unknown. There is no "Facebook service" which anyone can install and then be able to federate their content to and from Facebook as peers.
Virtually all of the megacorps today are behaving this way: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, and so on. They all hate the open Internet, and have closed it off at the application layers of the protocol stack so that you have to be an enrolled member of their private realm to participate. The closing of APIs is par for the course as they don't want interoperation, and federation even less. TFS is spot on.
At least we still have federated SMTP and unrestricted search engines, although probably that's only because they're data mining our email and search queries. It's no longer the open Internet we once had, but more a system of feudal lords and their private domains, and everyone else is a peasant.
It's a severe regression of Internet utility, and it's of benefit only to them.
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Walled Gardens (Score:1)
This is one of the walls around the walled garden. Apple controls what apps you may have, Comcast decides which websites you can go to. Facebook and LinkedIn decide what you can do on the internet, and the FBI makes sure you stay in the garden.
No surprises.
Really? (Score:1)
And nothing of value was lost.
Who uses or cares about LinkedIn? Every single professional I know that has one, doesn't do anything with it except delete the spam they get emailed.