eWEEK Labs Walk-through: LinkedIn Application Platform

eWEEK Labs Walk-through: LinkedIn Application Platformby eWEEK Labs

When we checked out LinkedIn Applications, the number of available apps sat at only nine—few enough for every app to be “Featured.”

The Events application is one of LinkedIn’s more interesting offerings. Through our LinkedIn connections, we could find events that we might not otherwise have known about.

We could signal our plans to attend an event or express our interest.

Certainly, Andrew Garcia would want to know about this Fiber-to-the-Home Council Members’ Meeting. We’ll shoot him a note about it.

You can add events by filling out a form, but there doesn’t appear to be a way to sync with an existing calendar source.

The app-adding screen at LinkedIn, shown here with SixApart’s BlogLink tool, is very similar to Facebook’s app-adding dialog.

The BlogLink app promises to hook you up with posts from your connections, but we found that the app unhelpfully attributed every post associated with a connection’s current or previous employer to that connection. Much repetition ensues.

It’s not clear to us why one would wish to access remote storage through their LinkedIn profile page, but there’s a Box.net app to help you do this.

We uploaded a text file to Box.net through LinkedIn, and we were offered the option of editing that file over at Zoho.

It wasn’t necessary for us to sign in to Zoho in order to edit the file we’d uploaded.

If the Zoho integration wasn’t enough, we could hit up another Web 2.0 service, iPaper, to view our file.

Who among us hasn’t wished they could host a slide deck from their LinkedIn page? Now there are two options for this, Google Presentations and SlideShare.

Huddle.net’s collaborative workspace service is now linked in to LinkedIn. What stood out for us in the implementation of this app is that it built us a workspace without asking us first to sign up for Huddle.net—thereby making good on its ad hoc image.