Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments. The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it’s less customizable. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company’s mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social media messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you’re looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post . Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it’s a work in progress and will improve soon. Sponsor What’s The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs! For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken. Not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase “contact X has updated their profile.” They have? How did they update it? It’s maddening. LinkedIn says it’s working on solving this problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn’s strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world – not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages. Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary Perhaps LinkedIn isn’t to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts’ info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you’ve got someone’s name and phone number on your phone already – it’s a headache to pull in a person’s LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually. Of course your phone number isn’t an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you’re unable to call. You won’t even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone’s contact list – peoples’ LinkedIn profile page URLs aren’t included in the contact info that gets imported. There’s No Push Notifications This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone – shouldn’t it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example – you know they’d like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too. Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she’s founded a new company called Shwowp . I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don’t know about it until a month later because I didn’t want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara’s news and I didn’t want to click through 3 screens starting with the bland “Tara Hunt has updated her profile” in order to see if she’s happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page. When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask and that’s when I’ll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life. Update: LinkedIn’s Adam Nash, author of the company’s announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: “we’ve discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue…Rest assured, we wouldn’t have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn’t have big plans for it. ” Discuss

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LinkedIn’s New iPhone App: The 3 Worst Things About It

This week ReadWriteWeb will run a series of posts detailing what we think are the five biggest, most cutting-edge Web trends to come out of 2009. We’ll be posting one trend analysis per day. Then at the end of the week we’ll publish a major update to our standard presentation about web technology trends. The first major Web trend we’re looking at is Structured Data . In prior presentations , this has sometimes been referred to under the umbrella term of ‘Semantic Web’. However the way 2009 has panned out so far, it’s become clear that this trend is much more than the Semantic Web. In this post, we’ll analyze the developments in Structured Data this year and provide you with 3 product examples: OpenCalais, Google, Wolfram Alpha. Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! Web of Data, Not Documents Tim Berners-Lee said in February this year that we’re now in a Web of Data , rather than a Web of Documents. The organization that Berners-Lee heads, the W3C, has heavily promoted two key initiatives that are helping to build this Web of Data: the Semantic Web and more recently Linked Data . However over the past few years, we’ve seen that there are many other ways to structure data and enable others to build off it. The best current example is surely Twitter , whose API has historically been responsible for around 90% of Twitter’s activity – via third party apps. The basic principle of the Web of Data is still the same as what Alex Iskold articulated on ReadWriteWeb back in March 2007: “unstructured information will give way to structured information – paving the road to more intelligent computing.” Example 1: OpenCalais Our first example product, OpenCalais , is probably the best current example of Linked Data (which is a type of structured data endorsed by W3C). Thomson Reuters, the international business and financial news giant, launched an API called OpenCalais in Feb ’08 . In a nutshell, OpenCalais turns unstructured HTML into semantically marked up data. It orders data into groups such as ‘people,’ ‘places,’ ‘companies’ and more. This way, third party applications and sites can build interesting new things from that data – one of the defining principles of Linked Data. For a full explanation of Linked Data, read Alexander Korth’s technical introduction The Web of Data: Creating Machine-Accessible Information from April 2009. I also explained the background and benefits of Linked Data in a May ’09 post entitled Linked Data is Blooming: Why You Should Care . Example 2: Google Rich Snippets In May this year, Google added structured data to its core search, in the form of a feature called ‘Rich snippets.’ Essentially this feature extracts and shows useful information from web pages, by way of structured data open standards such as microformats and RDFa. On launch in May, Google invited publishers to mark up their HTML. While it will take a while for this markup to become widespread, the fact that a huge company like Google implemented it shows the increasing importance of structured data on the Web. Other big companies are also heading in this direction – in particular, Yahoo was an early leader . Example 3: Wolfram Alpha Ever since Wolfram|Alpha ‘s much hyped launch in May , we’ve been tracking this innovative product closely. It’s a self-described “computational knowledge engine” and while it’s not quite the Google killer some predicted, it has many potential uses . Wolfram|Alpha has a search engine-like interface, allowing you to type natural language statements into it. But the main part of the product is the computations you can do on data. The product is premised on using and computing data . If Web 2.0 was about creating data (a.k.a. user generated content), then the next generation of the Web is all about using that data. Conclusion We can see from the above three examples that structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today’s Web. Companies like Thomson Reuters and Google are enabling data to be structured, and new types of products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can’t imagine right now. ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data The Real-Time Web Personalization Mobile Web & Augmented Reality Internet of Things Discuss

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Top 5 Web Trends of 2009: Structured Data

During my trip to Boston earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit MIT. At the end of a long day of meetings with various MIT tech masterminds, I made my way to the funny shaped building (see photo right-below) where the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its director Tim Berners-Lee work. Berners-Lee is of course the man who invented the World Wide Web 20 years ago. This was my first meeting with the Web’s creator, whose work and philosophy was a direct inspiration for me when I launched ReadWriteWeb back in 2003. 1 Sponsor Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb! After shaking hands, I told Tim Berners-Lee that this blog’s name was in part inspired by the first browser, which he developed, called ” WorldWideWeb “. That was a read/write browser; meaning you could not only browse and read content, but create and edit content too. It was a shame then when Mosaic, a read-only browser, became the first mainstream Web browser in the mid-90s. It wasn’t until the rise of Web 2.0 that the read/write philosophy gained widespread acceptance. 2 On that note, we launched into the interview… Note: the interview was published in two parts, with Part 1 on the topic of Linked Data. Part 2 explored other topics and can be found here . How Linked Data Relates to The Semantic Web RWW: Earlier this year you gave an inspiring talk at TED about Linked Data . You described Linked Data as a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself – i.e. we’ve gone from a Web of documents to a web of data. Can you please explain though how Linked Data relates to the Semantic Web, is it a subset of it? TBL: They fit in completely, in that the linked data actually uses a small slice of all the various technologies that people have put together and standardized for the Semantic Web. Linked Data uses a small slice of the technologies that make up the Semantic Web. We started off with the Semantic Web roadmap, which had lots of languages that we wanted to create. [However] the community as a whole got a bit distracted from the idea that actually the most important piece is the interoperability of the data. The fact that things are identified with URIs is the key thing. The Semantic Web and Linked Data connect because when we’ve got this web of linked data, there are already lots of technologies which exist to do fancy things with it. But it’s time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there. Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and ReadWriteWeb founder Richard MacManus How Linked Data Has Evolved via Grassroots RWW: Linked Data has had a lot of grassroots support, which you mentioned in your TED speech. This is something Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF, have struggled to get over the years. Has the W3C been pushing the more bottom-up Linked Data world, because of the frustration over lack of take-up of top-down Semantic Web ? TBL: A lot of the initial RDF and OWL projects came out of the academic world; and some of them were projects to show what you could do in a closed world. And the files were zipped up and left on a disc. While they were interesting projects, and while the systems were useful systems, the Semantic Web community maybe missed the point of the ‘web’ bit and focused too much on the ‘semantic’. However the work that’s been done in the Semantic Web, the standards, was really valuable. It’s relatively recently for example that SPARQL [an RDF query language] has been developed. “It’s time now to concentrate on getting the web of linked data out there.” Somebody drew an analogy the other day: can you imagine trying to promote a world of databases without SQL? Even though it’s not an interoperable protocol, it’s just a query language. So similarly, all that’s been put into RDF, rdfs and OWL is very valuable to the linked data community. The Linked Data community tend to use a subset of that [Semantic Web technologies], of OWL for example. But they certainly use SPARQL. So you could argue that really it wasn’t ready to be deployed widely. Linked Data started as a very informal Design Issues note that I put in; it was a grassroots movement from very early on. So yes W3C has been emphasizing the importance of Linked Data. It’s been the Semantic Web Interest Group of course, and various [other Semantic Web] activities, which has been pushing it. But also Linked Data has been seized on – a group of people for example put together DBpedia . 3 That wasn’t commissioned, that was that they just thought it would be a really cool idea. Graph of Linked Data sets on the Web, as at March 2009 Linked Data and Governments RWW: In a recent Design Issues note , you urge governments to put their data online as Linked Data (although you’d also be happy for governments to just make available the raw data – presumably so that others can then structure it). What do you realistically expect, for example, the U.S. or U.K. governments to do over the next year? And in the near future, do you foresee different governments interconnecting their Linked Data sets? TBL: One can’t generalize, governments are (like most big organizations) fascinatingly diverse inside them. So you’ll find that there are places inside governments where you get a champion who gets linked data and who’s just written a script and produced some linked data. So in the UK government for example, you’ll find there’s RDFa [in the code of its website] for civil service jobs. So if somebody wants to make a database of all the jobs, they can do that very easily. “The first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do.” There are other cases where the easiest thing for somebody to do is to just put data up in whatever form it’s available. Comma separated values (CSV) files are remarkably popular. They’re exported sometimes from spreadsheets. It’s remarkable how much information is in spreadsheets. Or sometimes pulled out of a database and then put up on the web. It’s not as good, not as useful to the community, as if Linked Data had been put up there and linked. But the first step of actually putting the data out there is the one that nobody else can do. Data.gov , a catalog of public data, was launched in May by the U.S. government The way to go is for government departments to go the extra step and convert [their data] into Linked Data. One of the nice things about Linked Data, when they have a pile of it, is that they could run a SPARQL server on it. SPARQL servers are a commodity product, a solution for all of the people who say ‘but actually I wanted to have XML.’ A SPARQL server will generate an XML file [and] allow somebody to write out, effectively, a URL for the XML file. “Linked Data is the backplane, it’s the thing that you connect to in both directions.” In fact, I don’t see why SPARQL servers shouldn’t provide CSV files, something which as far as I know isn’t in the standards. But I’d recommend it, certainly in government context, because CSV files are what people have and what people want. So the message [for government] is to use RDF. Linked Data is the backplane , it’s the thing that you connect to in both directions. As a [web] producer your job is to make sure that you produce Linked Data one way or another. And as a consumer, there are lots of ways to consume that data once it’s out there as Linked Data. In Part 2 of this interview we discussed: how previously reticent search engines like Google and Yahoo have begun to participate in the Semantic Web in 2009, user interfaces for browsing and using data, what Tim Berners-Lee thinks of new computational engine Wolfram Alpha, how e-commerce vendors are moving into the Linked Data world, and finally how the Internet of Things intersects with the Semantic Web. Read Part 2 here . Footnotes: 1. The very first sentence written on this blog , on 20 April, 2003, was: “The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfill the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it.” 2. For more on read/write browsers, you can read another early RWW post entitled What became of the Browser/Editor . 3. DBpedia is a community project to extract structured information from Wikipedia; see ReadWriteWeb’s profile of this and similar resources. Discuss

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ReadWriteWeb Interview With Tim Berners-Lee, Part 1: Linked Data

A while back, a friend of mine wondered about LinkedIn’s somewhat limited options for indicating how you know someone. (“I vomited on their shoes at the office party” isn’t on the list, for example.) We had a back-and-forth on her blog , and I came up with a list of some potentially useful additions to LinkedIn’s categories. You’ll find them below… but they’re only a starting point. Kindly add yours in the comments, and maybe – just maybe – they’ll be coming soon to a form field near you. Sponsor More Noise to Signal. Discuss

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Cartoon: That’s What Friends Are For

One of the first social networking aggregators to take advantage of LinkedIn’s brand-new API is Sobees , whose two client applications both now offer LinkedIn integration in addition to the other supported networks. A challenger to similar services like TweetDeck, Seesmic, and PeopleBrowser, Sobees is a social networking aggregation tool originally launched as a desktop app back in 2008 with a web app version added earlier this year. Like its competitors, Sobees’ clients use a columnar interface to display real-time updates from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. Sponsor Sobees essentially functions as a social networking client for the sites it supports, each site with its own column and separate set of functions and tabs. For example, in the Twitter column, you can switch through tabs to see replies and direct messages and you can use buttons on the side to create groups or view your favorites. Meanwhile, the Facebook column offers Facebook-specific features like the ability to view photo albums and status updates or check out profiles, friend lists, and your inbox. Sobees Adds LinkedIn Similarly, the newly-launched LinkedIn functionality will include features specific to LinkedIn. At launch time, those are as follows: Update your status View connections View profiles Get updates (connections updates, status updates, application updates, jobs posted, groups joined, recommendations and profile changes) Search or search with advanced functionality While the desktop version of the program is Windows-only, the web-based application is built using Microsoft’s Silverlight technology which works on any operating system, even Linux . When you go to set up the web version for the first time, you’ll be presented with the four supported services and a button reading “connect.” At first, clicking the connect button seemed to have no effect but that was because the browser’s pop-up blocker was turned on and Sobees launches the authorization screens in a separate window. After navigating past this small obstacle, the rest of the set up process was completed in a matter of minutes. At this point, you’re now presented with multiple columns containing the services you authorized during setup. You can also choose to add a real-time search column if desired and you can re-arrange the columns into a number of different layouts using the “change layout” button at the top. FactFinder API Integration Lets You Know if a Link is Worth Clicking Besides simply displaying the most recent updates from the various services, Sobees also offers a unique feature other social networking applications don’t have – Factery’s FactFinder API integration. ( Read more about Factery’s API here ). In short, this API allows the Sobees client to instantly and automatically parse the URLs posted in Twitter links to help you determine whether or not the link is worth clicking. Using the FactFinder toggle button to the left of the column, your Twitter stream is filtered to show only links with Factery data. Once switched on, tweets with links are appended with the source URL and various “facts” snipped from the article being shared. Depending on the amount of info the API pulls, a “more…” link may appear at the bottom of the facts displayed. Click this link to see more facts – aka snippets – from the article in question and then click “less” to once again collapse the window. Anyone who has switched to Twitter as their primary source of news will love this sort of feature as you can get the gist of an article without ever leaving Twitter. If you’re interested in trying the updated Sobees clients, you can download the desktop version here or load the web version at sobees.com/web . Discuss

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Social Aggregator Sobees Adds LinkedIn Support

Two years and a month after announcing that it would launch a more professional-looking developer platform than the wildly successful one at Facebook, LinkedIn today finally opened up a series of application programming interfaces for other companies to build on top of. Make no mistake about it, though – there’s some good news and there’s some bad news. LinkedIn holds an incredibly useful body of data about its users – not just because of the relatively high net worth it brags about its users having but because employment information is a very useful way to put a person in context on the web. That data is now available for an ecosystem of other developers to incorporate; TweetDeck, Posterous, Ribbit and several other applications already have. Sponsor The Good News It’s easy to get started. After two years of waiting, unreplied emails and heartbreak – developers should now be able to get an API key within minutes and start building on the LinkedIn platform. That’s great news and not something that could have been taken for granted. The API allows search. That’s great because with a little disambiguation done on the client side you can find the LinkedIn accounts of people you’re connected to on other networks. Unfortunately, no one is doing exactly that yet – but isn’t that the biggest value proposition here? I see a person on Twitter, on Facebook, on some other social network and I want to see what they do for a living. Let the app collect and expose that data from LinkedIn! Disambiguation of people with the same name and privacy limitations regarding who gets to see who’s information are both complicating factors. The coolest use of the search API we’ve seen so far is Salim Ishmael’s Knx.to . That service is limited to your own connections so far, but it’s definitely a keeper. The API uses OAuth . That means that 3rd parties can offer fast, secure, standardized authentication into your LinkedIn user account. That’s great. Activity updates are now parsable by type. The API allows developers to pull in just one type of the many updates a person gets on LinkedIn. Will someone please build an app that just shows me when my contacts change jobs and leaves out all the status messages, friend connections and other cruft? That kind of granular control has a lot of potential and is reminiscent of the vision behind the proposed user activity data protocol Activity Streams . And Now For the Bad News… The first use-cases make it look like LinkedIn is trying to be Twitter. Tweetdeck and Posterous are the most high-profile early adopters of the new API; Tweetdeck will give you a LinkedIn column (too bad LinkedIn contacts can’t be integrated into other columns) and Posterous will let you publish links to updates on that platform over to your LinkedIn contacts’ streams. Jobdash looks like Tweetdeck just for LinkedIn and job-hunting, but it doesn’t yet offer features like limited display of notifications by type – it’s just a big stream of updates. LinkedIn is not Twitter! LinkedIn’s Adam Nash told us this morning that he loves the Twitter and Twitter-like integrations but “integrating messaging isn’t the goal, there’s a wide range of business applications that will benefit from it. Twitter is hot so people are jumping to that but there are far more compelling business cases.” Two years after the business-oriented platform was announced tiny Tweetdeck was just so hot it out-maneuvered all the business applications that could have been built to showcase? I don’t buy it. Just like the formal partnership between Twitter and LinkedIn earlier this month , I worry that this API is built with marketing, promotion and broadcast functions best served. Terms and Conditions are unclear, restrictive and changing. The API terms say that you can’t build applications that compete with LinkedIn. API management service Mashery CEO Oren Michels (disclosure: RWW sponsor) had this in response to say: “It appears that you can’t create a new experience around LinkedIn, an iPhone app for example. You might create some interesting bolt-ons to other services that might drive users to linkedin.com – but that’s a very 5 years-ago approach to an API.” “The signal from this is that they aren’t encouraging developers to take the social graph and deep knowledge of peoples’ professional lives and create new UIs for interacting with LinkedIn because they are explicitly concerned about competition,” Michels said. “LinkedIn has amazing assets and a great business model – get out of the UI business!” Likewise several developers have expressed concern around the commercial limitations on the API. LinkedIn’s Nash clarified with us that those terms simply prohibit charing people extra money for access to the free LinkedIn service and building an advertising network on top of LinkedIn profile data because of privacy concerns. Finally, the terms of the API aren’t very clear. Nash said they were a work in progress and likely to be changed. Some of those changes appear to have been made in the 3 hours since the API launched . Likewise, Michels points out that rate limits on accessing the API aren’t made explicit – only that there will be rate limits and that a developer can email LinkedIn to request a personal expansion of their limit. Not playing nice with others: LinkedIn is exposing what it calls an Activity Stream, but it’s not at all related to the standardized format that Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and others are now publishing. LinkedIn publishes some Microformats but has been entirely absent from the wide-ranging community discussion of Activity Streams formats, we’re told. Michaels may have said it best: “There are some really smart people over there at LinkedIn. If this is what we waited 2 and a half years for, it’s a bit disappointing.” It is a bit, but not entirely disappointing. We look forward to seeing how the platform evolves and what kinds of applications are built on top of it. The web has been waiting a long time for a LinkedIn platform – now let’s see what happens. Discuss

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LinkedIn Finally Opens Platform: The Good & Bad News