Is LinkedIn Becoming Too Social?

Is LinkedIn becoming too social?

LinkedIn has recently opened it’s platform for compatibility with third party applications as well as launching Twitter integration. Is all this turning a professional network into a social one?

You can now link your Twitter account with LinkedIn, allowing you to syndicate your tweets with your LinkedIn status. I’m not sure that many of us would want our personal tweets going to a professional networking site. Luckily this is something that LinkedIn had considered, giving you the option to only syndicate tweets that include a #in tag.

TweetDeck, a popular social media dashboard, has just integrated LinkedIn. Meaning you can now send status updates to LinkedIn directly from TweetDeck, as well as receiving updates from your network. Just be careful not to post that Tweet or Facebook message to LinkedIn by mistake. Download the latest TweeDeck release here.

All of this does show some great innovation from the professional network. They have recently reached 3 million users in the UK and receive a healthy level of site traffic around the world, ranking 19, 18 and 32 in the USA, UK and Australia respectively (stats from Alexa).

Opening it’s platform and integrating social media platforms such as Twitter is a step forward in gaining a larger user base, but will this blurring of the professional and social cause problems? It does offer users an easier way to access and update their LinkedIn profiles. Improving usability in this way will help ensure people not only set up their profile on LinkedIn, but use the site as a communication channel.

Let’s just see if they go as far as Facebook integration next…

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  • http://walteradamson.com Walter Adamson

    With a few tweaks Facebook could replace Linkedin and although this is a view which is almost universally dismissed I don't think it is unlikely at all.

  • http://www.twitter.com/freakinbert freakinbert

    Many things are becoming to Twitter happy. Just look at the damn comments below most of them are retweets of this article with no substance to them. I see this all too often on other sites as well and do not get it. Comments are for comments, not to post the same information. Giving some people access to Twitter is like giving a kid a loaded uzi.

  • http://ariherzog.com Ari Herzog

    You know the saying that if you have nothing to say, don't say it in the first place? I wish more people would remember that when they send a Twitter update it replicates on their Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, LinkedIn, Plurk, blog, and every other stream imaginable.

    It gets to the point that the update is meaningless.