LinkedIn cut off access to BranchOut, BeKnown (two recruiting apps that reside in Facebook and enabled
users to pull data directly from their LinkedIn profiles) and several other apps on Friday…see the full deet’s in this article from TechCrunch.
Two reasons at play here, one app was apparently intent on creating a premium based enterprise recruiting tool, and the other may have been blatantly promoting their service (and according to the article there were concerns the second app would also get involved with a premium enterprise recruiting search tool).
Good for LinkedIn. They should protect themselves and their data. They’re big business, and guess what? We’re all guests at their party.
If anything, it’s their time to be playing the Cuba Gooding Jr role from Jerry Maguire:
That’s right, you want to play with their users? You gotta pay. Show ‘em the money. Right now, if you’re an app and you want their content to make money for you, hell, I think you should face the same thing we recruiters face and have to pay. I bet LinkedIn has it all figured out, just give ‘em a call. It’ll be tiered and I’m betting if your app is the one to really figure out recruiting on Facebook, using the LinkedIn knowledge base, LinkedIn will talk to you.
The BranchOut rebuttal? (changes to the LinkedIn API won’t hurt us much since a low percentage of our users actually used it, and btw, we believe users should be able to own their personal data and transfer it where it has the most ultility. PS – the next generation recruiting product will be built on Facebook)…what can I say…it’s perfect.
As for Monster’s rebuttal to LinkedIn? (We are surprised and disappointed by LinkedIn’s decision, which we believe not only goes against the interests of LinkedIn users, but also contradicts what LinkedIn claims to stand for – openness and connectivity) Sweet. The air of entitlement made me chuckle….literally chuckle. Like Monster is absolutely entitled to LinkedIn’s customer base and offended that LinkedIn would think otherwise…this is the same Monster that has monetized the hell out of the online recruiting process and are indiscriminate, corporate or TPR, you pay to play. I am sure the people at Monster are smart enough to realize there are other ways for their BeKnown users to access their LinkedIn networks, it’s all tied to exporting connections, I found that semi-inferred in their response.
All these little apps are great, and watching this tech drama play out is fun. But they’ll all be forgotten the day Facebook decides to roll out its own version of LinkedIn. The moment FB decides to conquer the professional networking market and stress the importance of completing the information tab to its users and making it, and only it, either publicly available (i.e. you appear in search results on Google and Bing) or housed within a sub-network created just for your professional connections (and of course not revealing those Last Friday Night pics your friends put up or who you’re connected too)…well all apps will be forgotten and it’ll provide a total new round of major dollars for Zuckerberg.
LinkedIn has over 100 million members and huge corporations and individual recruiters pay and pay for access. The potential to have access to over 600 million international members? And have Facebook backing the initiative? Huge.
Kelly,
I think the problem is (and have really noticed this since the right-before-IPO and since, is that LinkedIn is clamping everything down that isn’t already being paid for. Now I can’t even look at all the people who have viewed my profile (I think you get up to 5 pro-bono) unless I cough up 10-50 bucks a month to use it? Sorry, but that’s BS, and totally against the notion of sharing and connecting that they were built on, as far as I remember it.
I’m still a fan, but really starting to see the (not sure if it’s greed?) blatant monetizing or playing to the street.
While I agree that they shouldn’t allow Monster et al the ability to just parse their data, they are also taking steps to edge out the average user. Then again, we knew this day would come.
Hey Pete -
Yeah I know…life was bliss in 2004, but back then it was early adopters that were all over the site, I think the monetization really started to hit in 2008/2009……having seen this happen in the late 90s with job boards, it doesn’t surprise me. But at least with job boards you had 5 fighting for your recruiting dollar so you could negotiate.
What is surprising is there really doesn’t seem to be any competition for LinkedIn, except, maybe….Google +. With free and open profiles that link to social/professional networks it could be our new and free gold mine. But recruiters have to push it so candidates know about it, just like we did with LinkedIn.
Best,
K.