As Facebook’s stock continues to decline, the world’s largest social network is beginning to be compared to a smaller competitor that has had more success on Wall St. LinkedIn, the social network for professional networking, has seen a slow, careful build of its social network that is reflected in the incremental rise of its stock price since its successful IPO last year.
Part of the reason LinkedIn is popular with both its investors and its users is the constant smaller changes and redesigns the company is making to its products. Just last month the LinkedIn homepage was redesigned, and was favorably accepted without the large outcry that often comes from changes to social networks.
Today, LinkedIn announced that it has updated its developer platform with a redesign and new features. Some of the new changes were previewed in a blog post over at the LinkedIn Blog.
Changes include a redesigned developer website, which the company claims is “cleaner” and easier to navigate. The “Sign in with LinkedIn Experience,” which lets developers use LinkedIn logins for their applications, has also been redesigned. LinkedIn’s Share API has been updated to provide attribution on the LinkedIn update stream to “qualified” developers.
LinkedIn has also updated its API terms of service. From the blog post:
This further clarifies the best ways to work with LinkedIn to provide the best experience possible for our developers and our members. In the past year we’ve launched partner programs in several areas where we see opportunities to work more closely with developers, such as the Certified Developer Program. We encourage developers to explore our available APIs or contact us for partnership opportunities.
Clarifications to LinkedIn’s developer terms of service should prevent issues such as the Pealk incident from happening again. Pealk was the developer of the self-proclaimed “#1 Hunting App for LinkedIn” that was banned from accessing LinkedIn’s API after violating LinkedIn’s terms of service.