LinkedIn will remain absolutely free of zombies, pirates and mixed drinks, Dan Nye told the New York Times.  Where facebook is centered around social networking and time-wasting, LinkedIn is for professionals and business.  The message is clear: they don’t need any poking (or even Pro Poking).

This decision is important in light of LinkedIn allowing third-parties to design applications for its site. But these tools won’t be allowed to replicate out of control, burying user details under pages and pages of irrelevancy.  Each tool will have to be approved by LinkedIn itself.

Some may say that this will cause a huge bottleneck in application delivery, but LinkedIn believe the quality-control provided will be more than worth it.  After all, if the site works as it is there isn’t any rush to add things that will break it.

This first-party screening will also allow Mr. Nye to develop his plans to earn that most treasured of commodities: cash.  He has made it clear that LinkedIn expects to earn revenue from approved applications.  This shows more business sense than the cannibalistic facebook apps, where most of those making money are making it from other wannabe applications.

It makes sense.  People go to LinkedIn to work, so anything that can help them with that is worth money – and if they started getting buried under "How well do you know me?" quizzes, they’ll start going somewhere else.

Meanwhile Facebook pioneers wonder how they can generate external revenue, maybe not realizing a basic fact: people like killing time by throwing hamburgers at each other when it’s free.  Ask them to pay and they’ll likely go somewhere else.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 11:48 am under Advertising.

Read more entries by Luke McKinney.
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