[jpcx01]

Having fought LinkedIn's APIs and dealt with their crappy developer support, I'd like to give a very big warning to anyone who might be thinking about using their platform.

1) Their terms of use is unbelievably narrow. They own everything, and it's up to their discretion whether they think you are a competitor and can shut of your data access

2) Took them forever to get SSL support for their widgets. Despite tons of dev requests for it, they seemed to actively fight against it. Really friggin bizarre.

[atrachtenberg]

1) The goal is to enable great apps that don't damage our ecosystem. This creates a healthy environment where everyone is happy and wants to continue investment.

If we didn't want people to build apps, we never would have launched a platform. If we're shutting people off for no good reason, it is a waste of our time and yours. But we would be foolish not let us protect ourselves from people actively causing harm.

2) There was a reason the platform was labeled as "Early Access" before today: there were key pieces missing, such as SSL support.

We always wanted to have SSL, but it was later on the roadmap than shipping code that worked over HTTP. SSL isn't trivial when using a CDN. It's not an unsolved problem, but we wanted to do it in a solid fashion, and that took time when balanced with other features we were building.

[yesimahuman]

I have also built for the LinkedIn API. The TOS is very unnerving and I personally wouldn't build any kind of business on it. LinkedIn has a lot of good data but they own it, and developers have to come to terms with that. I think LinkedIn rests on a gold mine of business intelligence data that they are using much too lightly.

[phlux]

This is probably exactly why they act the way they do: they know the data is a goldmine and they want to protect that resource. Create a very narrow TOS and await ideas from the developer community such that they get a good idea of what to build on that data in the future.

[chapel]

1) It is funny you say this, because that is how most platforms are. Look at Apple, Twitter or Microsoft. Not to say your warning isn't justified, but it is part of the game that is played when dealing with 3rd party platforms. They introduce them to bolster their own networks, and if they don't like what you are doing, or feel that you are competition, they will force you out one way or another.

[RockyMcNuts]

Welcome to the brave new mobile/cloud world, where everyone has to ask permission from everybody before anything gets implemented.

[loire280]

To be fair, some of these APIs expose data sets and user bases that we couldn't have dreamed of accessing ten years ago. It sucks when we get locked out by the API provider, but the availability of these APIs has transformed what a single developer or small team can create.

[meterplech]

I can empathize with the frustration, but it definitely makes sense for LinkedIn. Unlike Facebook (which also has difficulties for development), LinkedIn has many monetization strategies besides advertising. They must be strategically very careful not to let anyone else monetize their professional network graph.

They are only opening up in response to Facebook and to attract more people to the site.