LinkedIn Restricts API Usage

mpicpp points out LinkedIn's new API policy. "LinkedIn is restricting access to most of its application programming interfaces (APIs) to companies that have struck up partnerships with the social networking company. 'Over the past several years, we've seen some exciting applications from our developer community. While many delivered value back to our members and LinkedIn, not all have,' wrote Adam Trachtenberg, director of the LinkedIn developer network, explaining in a blog post the change in the company's API policy. Starting May 12, LinkedIn will only offer a handful of its APIs for general use, namely those that allow users and companies to post information about themselves on the service. After then, only companies that have enrolled in LinkedIn's partner program will have API access. Samsung, WeChat, and Evernote have already struck such partnerships. Currently, the social networking service offers a wide range of APIs, which allow third-party programs to draw content from, and place content into, LinkedIn. APIs have been seen as an additional channel for businesses to interact with their users and partners. A few companies, however, have recently scaled back access to APIs, which provide the programmatic ability to access a company's services and data. Netflix shut its public API channel in November, preferring to channel its user information through a small number of partners. ESPN also disabled public access to its APIs in December. LinkedIn's move is evidence of how the business use of APIs are evolving, said John Musser, founder and CEO at API Science, which offers an API performance testing service."

Comments

I just wish...

[flightmaker]

...that bloody LinkedIn would stop spamming my mail box with fictitious contacts from people I've never had anything to do with.

Why the hell they think they have some right to use my address when I've never had anything whatsoever to do with them I don't know.

Megacorps are hostile to the open Internet

[Morgaine]

The Internet was founded upon the idea of open interoperation between all endpoints and federation between different instances of the same service protocol (think of SMTP and globally interoperating MTAs). These concepts were so fundamental that they are mentioned explicitly in the IETF Mission Statement as their central goal.

Then Big Business came along, and they didn't like the concept of a level playing field of unhindered interoperation and federation. Now almost every large corporation is trying to fence off their little corner of the Internet into a private realm which they guard jealously. Other companies are denied interoperation unless they pay up (or it's denied entirely), and federation between like services is virtually unknown. There is no "Facebook service" which anyone can install and then be able to federate their content to and from Facebook as peers.

Virtually all of the megacorps today are behaving this way: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, and so on. They all hate the open Internet, and have closed it off at the application layers of the protocol stack so that you have to be an enrolled member of their private realm to participate. The closing of APIs is par for the course as they don't want interoperation, and federation even less. TFS is spot on.

At least we still have federated SMTP and unrestricted search engines, although probably that's only because they're data mining our email and search queries. It's no longer the open Internet we once had, but more a system of feudal lords and their private domains, and everyone else is a peasant.

It's a severe regression of Internet utility, and it's of benefit only to them.