Announcing Applications on LinkedIn
Filed Under (Networking) by on 29-10-2008
Tagged Under : answers, archives, categories, events, features, linkedin-com, main, people, photos, press, privacy-policy, quantcast, recent-posts, search, tips-and-tricks, trackback, tutorials
Hi Everyone. I’m writing today to announce the launch of LinkedIn’s applications platform that will enable over 30 million professionals on LinkedIn to communicate, collaborate, and share information even better than before.
This initial roll out features productivity applications that range from gathering information that professionals around you are generating to enhancing your abilities to collaborate and communicate more effectively. You’ll be able to work much more closely with your contacts on LinkedIn with tools such as file sharing, project management, business trips and many more.
The nine applications that you see live today on LinkedIn include productivity enhancing applications from Amazon, Box.net, Google, Huddle, Six Apart, SlideShare, Tripit, and WordPress as well a Company Buzz application developed by LinkedIn. Each of these applications will help you stay current and competitive as a professional in today’s rapidly changing business world.
The video below gives an overview of our application platform featuring many of the application partners mentioned above.
Colorado Software Summit 2008
Filed Under (Networking) by on 28-10-2008
Tagged Under : answers, api, architecture, business, conference, engineering, events, linked, linkedin, main, people, photos, search, security, softwaresummit, tutorials, view-on-slideshare, weather, yanpujante
Last week, I attended the Colorado Software Summit. This conference took place at the Keystone Ski Resort; located at over 9000 feet in altitude (over 2.8km). It was my first time attending the conference and also my first time as a (public) speaker. I have to say that I was very impressed with the conference. First of all, the format of the conference is very different than more ‘traditional’ software conferences: every speaker is required to present 2 different topics, 3 times each. The net effect is that it is easy to catch a topic since it is repeated 3 times. It also makes every session much more convivial since the number of participants is smaller, thus making it easy to ask questions and interact with the speakers. At the end of the week, it really felt like we were part of a family. Below are some pictures I took during the the morning it snowed.
Even with my busy schedule as a speaker, I was able to attend top notch sessions on varied topics such as Apache Mina, Service Component Architecture (SCA), Esper, REST and many more. My 2 topics were the following:
Security 2.0 - How LinkedIn changed its security model in order to offer an API
LinkedIn used to be mostly member centric, with the traditional member login / session pattern. When the need arose to open up an API, we revisited the model in order to seamlessly integrate calls coming from the main website as well as calls coming from the APIs. This session covered several aspects of our changes:
- How we made the business logic code unaware of who the caller is from a security point of view (RBAC).
- Which security model was chosen for the API and why (Yahoo model vs Amazon model).
This talk also covered how LinkedIn retrofitted the security model chosen for the API into the mainstream website, which helped tremendously in the scalability of the website by allowing stateless front-end / single sign-on (SSO), and improved security by removing sessions entirely.
Building LinkedIn’s next Generation Architecture with OSGi
Over the course of the last 5 years, LinkedIn has been built using relatively simple technologies: front end web applications (Tomcat/Servlet/JSP), back-end services (Jetty/Spring Remoting), databases, replication, and JMS. Although the web site was scaling adequately, we had some big challenges to overcome:
- A growing Engineering Team working on a monolithic code base (albeit modular).
- A growing Product Team wanting more and more features, faster.
- A growing Operations Team deploying more and more servers.
- And more…
In this session, I talked about why OSGi was chosen to help us solve those challenges, the implementation progress we’ve made, the pitfalls that we’ve encountered (so far) and what we have learned in the process.
I want to thank Wayne and Peggy Kovsky for organizing such a great conference as well as all the participants and speakers… and the weather for snowing just the right amount. 
Here is the original post:
Colorado Software Summit 2008
LinkedIn Search: Finding that former colleague of yours just got easier
Filed Under (Networking) by on 27-10-2008
Tagged Under : answers, archives, categories, events, features, goldman-sachs, linkedin-com, main, on-flickr, people, photos, press, quantcast, recent-posts, search, tips-and-tricks, tutorials
I’d like to announce today the launch of our new search platform, currently released to a small percentage of our LinkedIn users. In addition, a certain percentage of the remaining users can explore the new search experience by simply clicking on the “Try LinkedIn’s new People Search” link at the top of search results pages.
As the largest global professional network, we’ve had the privilege of having millions of users enter over a billion professional search queries, and we’ve been working hard to build a much more robust professional people search engine. We interviewed lots of users and aggregated thousand of pieces of feedback. The end result is a completely redesigned search experience aimed at making it easier and faster to find the most relevant professionals that you’re looking for.
Here is a quick summary of the new features that will be phased out to all of our users in the coming months:
1. Unified search results:
We eliminated the need to switch tabs if you want to see professionals outside your network. The new search will retrieve the most relevant professionals from the entire LinkedIn community.
2. More powerful relevance algorithm:
The new relevance sort not only takes into account keyword relevance but also leverages both the professional graph and the rich profile data to ensure that the most relevant professionals are always shown at the top of your search results page.
3. Redesigned search results page:
Speaking of the search results page, we’ve redesigned this page from the ground up to make it more readable and actionable. This includes a new streamlined look, the ability to refine you searches from a new “Modify your search” module on the right rail, easily accessible sorts and views, and the ability to take actions from the results page as you mouse over results.
4. In Common:
“In Common” is a new field in search results that lets you see what connections and groups you share with the selected user.
5. Saved Searches:
This is one of the most requested features. We’ll allow you to save searches and very soon we’ll let you get reminders over email if we find someone new that meets your criteria.
6. Views:
We now offer two views as part of the search results redesign, basic and expanded. In addition, we also let you create your own view. You’ll be able to add or remove fields from search results based on what makes the most sense for your type of searches.
7. Spell check:
We know how hard typing people’s names is. We hear it from our users and also see it in the data. As a result, we built a robust spell checker for names. We’ll expand the spell checker to other type of keywords very soon.
8. Type-ahead for connections:
We also saw in the data that many of you use search to get to your connections quickly. In order to make it more efficient, we developed a type-ahead widget that recommends connections as you type from any people search box.
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We’ll be testing all of these features over the next few weeks as we fine tune them for full release.
Goldman Sachs, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and SAP Ventures join the LinkedIn team
Filed Under (Networking) by on 23-10-2008
Tagged Under : answers, archives, dan-nye, events, goldman-sachs, linkedin-com, main, people, photos, press, quantcast, recent-posts, sap, search, the-mcgraw-hill-companies, tips-and-tricks, tutorials
I’m happy to announce today that we’ve received strategic investments in LinkedIn totaling $22.7 million from market leaders in the enterprise software, investment banking and business information sectors; all of whom believe in the power of LinkedIn as a way to connect professionals and help them be effective. This round of funding includes world class strategic investors Goldman Sachs, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and SAP ventures; as well as a re-investment by Bessemer Venture Partners.
This financing is a follow-on of the Series D round of funding we announced in June of 2008, in which we raised $53 million. Led by Bain Capital Ventures LinkedIn’s Series D financing round has raised $75.7 million. You can find my thoughts on our Series D announcement here.
I’d like to reiterate our commitment to creating the right partnerships to help us build a great service for over 30 million professionals on LinkedIn today - a number that’s growing by leaps and bounds each month. This funding strengthens LinkedIn further, and will help us to continue creating additional services for professionals to connect and collaborate more effectively, around the world. Services that allow you to connect with the people you trust, build out a robust online professional profile and collaborate with members of your professional network on LinkedIn.
USA Today: LinkedIn and the business of productivity
Filed Under (Networking) by on 17-10-2008
Tagged Under : answers, archives, business, categories, events, features, linkedin-com, main, people, photos, press, quantcast, recent-posts, search, tips-and-tricks, trackback, tutorials
The LinkedIn blog is broken down into two broad categories: Using LinkedIn (Features, Answers, and Users) and LinkedIn News (Press, People and Events). While our primary focus is to bring you breaking news on every user-facing feature, we’ll also be covering on a more timely basis, some of the recent press mentions of note under the Press category.
