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.