"LinkedIn" Social-Business Network - Development Platform

According to the PR, "Today, the LinkedIn platform is available to any developer at http://developer.linkedin.com for easy access to LinkedIn's rich set of APIs to make business applications better. By providing its APIs to third parties, LinkedIn is enabling any business application to benefit from the power of adding professional identify and connections to reveal where business collaborations are happening."

I have always been excited about developer platforms. However, at the end of the day, how many developers are making any money at this. Rather is it yet another technology "in search of" a customer. I like Linkedin, cool site works well and can be somewhat helpful in finding people. It's a recruiters dream come true but can't say that I have done any business via Linkedin and certainly have wasted hundreds of hours. I know people who spend their lives on Facebook, well far too many hours a day on it. However, most people can use Facebook while they are at work so the time is not wasted, except from employer's point of view.

Here's some more from the PR "LinkedIn has done a number of integrations with some of the most significant applications in the enterprise including Microsoft, IBM and BlackBerry. Beginning today, popular services including TweetDeck, Posterous and Box.net, to name a few, will launch applications integrating LinkedIn." Ok, my Twitter account is linked to my LinkedIn account, that's nice but not necessary.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google, Yahoo! are all like the cable TV channels with so many channels and so little content. Add-in Oprah (http://www.oprah.com), the ultimate social marketer, you have a dazzling array or dizzying mess of messages and media. While I like efforts like Facebook Marketing for Dummies (http://www.amazon.com/Facebook-Marketing-Dummies-Paul-Dunay/dp/0470487623) (per FTC guidelines, I have not received any compensation, however, I did receive an unsolicited copy of the book) to help explain "how to" do social marketing on Facebook. However, it's going to take more than a book to explain how they all fit together into a comprehensive marketing-communications (marcom) strategy other than do ALL of it. The great Marshall McLuhan, referred to the "media as the message." However, without the message is just a mess.