Well, it looks like LinkedIn is going the way of Facebook and MySpace and adding an application section to its offerings. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days now and have just a few thoughts…
Wednesday morning – when the announcement was made – I jumped in and started playing. The applications available looked pretty interesting, but of the ones on offering, I took only the Slideshare, My Travel and Huddle Workspaces ones. I immediately hit a snag – none of them worked well (or at all, in the case of Slideshare) in my Firefox 3 browser. I reluctantly gave in and fired up IE7 and gave it another whirl. That seemed to fix the issues I was having, but it made me very unhappy…
And then I ended up posting this without finishing it, so I’ll do that now. I do love scheduling posts, except when I forget that I’ve scheduled them.
Anyway – it’s been a couple of days since the apps were added and I haven’t noticed any really outstanding uses of them – yet. I think the Huddle one – where you can create a workspace on LinkedIn and collaborate with your “connections” will be really interesting to watch. I may post again about this later if I find any really good uses of these – but it seems like I’m not the only one with issues getting them going, so I just don’t have a lot of “real world use” information yet!
Category: mashups
Hey – I just learned about a new “contest” being sponsored by the UK Government in which they are looking for creative and useful mashups using public data (crime, health, education data that is released by the government, but not in particularly useful ways). This is a fabulous idea!! What a great way to get people thinking about using the REAMS of data produced by the government! For a list of ideas that have been submitted so far, check out their Ideas page.
The winner of the contest will get their idea funded by the government and the chance for Internet fame and fortune – such as that might be… Wonder if this (in a stripped down fashion) would work for a library – we put out massive amounts of data about our collections, ILL information and more – or we could add pointers to public data ourselves and get civic-minded folks to do something with it!
