LinkedIn and the Yahoo! Open Search effort

LinkedIn and Yahoo! announced their intention to support semantic web standards the Open Search platform.

In the coming months, Yahoo! search results will display LinkedIn Public Profiles in a richer and more compelling format. (example below)

LinkedIn | Yahoo! Open Search (Amit Kumar)

What does it mean for the LinkedIn User?

LinkedIn is all about letting you control and promote your brand identity as a professional. We want to help you be found by others in ways that will help you professionally – whether it's reconnecting with old colleagues, getting contacted by business leads, or hearing about that next great career opportunity.

A key part of that is allowing our members to maintain customizable public profiles that are indexed by the top search engines – thus making sure that anyone looking for you via Google or Yahoo! search will find you. Yahoo! Open Search allows us to take this functionality to the next level. The more information you expose on your profile, the easier it will be for initiatives such as Yahoo's Open Search to display that when you're searched for.

And because you can control the details included in your public profile, you’re in complete control over the information that shows up here. In fact, your data won't be displayed in the above format unless you customize your public profile and claim your custom public profile URL. Go ahead and establish your online brand by fine-tuning your public profile settings on LinkedIn (links below)

 

The web is better when it's social

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network's friends and update feeds.

Many sites, one API

Common APIs mean you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by Google in conjunction with members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the APIs and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

In order for developers to get started immediately, Orkut has opened a limited sandbox that you can use to start building apps using the OpenSocial APIs.