The Social

Last month, Twitter posted a job listing saying it was looking for someone who knew business, and now it looks like the microblogging site has found one--the first of several, it appears. Twitter has hired Kevin Thau, a veteran of tech companies Buzzwire and Openwave, as its director of mobile business development.

According to Twitter stats app Twitterholic, Thau has been using Twitter since early March of last year. He's been hired in part to handle the "crushing amount" of partnership proposals that Twitter receives. The mobile front is particularly important for Twitter, as it's the primary platform for many users. It's also been a contentious space, because it involves dealing with cell phone carriers around the world. Skyrocketing costs have forced Twitter to cut some of its international mobile numbers.

It's the first business development post that the San Francisco-based Twitter has filled. But it's currently also looking to hire a business product manager and a director of strategic partnerships. Twitter hasn't put forth a concrete business plan yet, but executives have hinted that business partnerships or corporate accounts may be part of the strategy.

There's nary a sheep to be tossed on business network LinkedIn's new developer platform, which has officially gone live.

The array of internal- and partner-created applications includes a "reading list" app from Amazon, a trip-tracking app from TripIt, file sharing from Box.net, and presentation apps from SlideShare and Google Presentation.

"One of the big differences between LinkedIn and some of the other platforms is that we're being very selective about the apps that are integrated onto our platform," LinkedIn vice president of platform Jamie Templeton told CNET News. Developers and companies must go through an assessment process before their apps are approved. For obvious reasons, they have to fit into LinkedIn's buttoned-up mold, which means that a "Drunk Office Christmas Party Photo Slideshow" app probably doesn't have enough of a "professional" spin.

Something else you won't find on LinkedIn's app platform? Those ad networks that are all over the likes of Facebook and MySpace's platforms. For external advertisements, the apps must work with LinkedIn. But they'll also have the option to make money through retail (like Amazon's app) and subscriptions--while apps are free by default, they can have premium subscriptions, as Box.net's and collaborator Huddle.net's applications do.

Right now, LinkedIn members can add a maximum of 15 applications to their profiles, but Templeton said that the addition of "secondary pages" for more apps will come soon.

A look at TripIt on a LinkedIn profile.

(Credit: LinkedIn)

Business social network LinkedIn has given itself a New Year's makeover a few weeks early: the site has announced a home page redesign and new features, and has simultaneously launched a developer program that it calls "InApps."

For LinkedIn, which says that it recently passed 17 million user accounts, this move comes at a time when some observers are saying that business social networks are about to take off in a big way. The redesigned home page has not gone fully live, but is now accessible to logged-in LinkedIn members on a beta page. Included among the improvements are modules to show what questions people in your network are asking through the LinkedIn Answers feature; a selection of "connections of your connections"; and a smattering of jobs and opportunities that your network might offer.

Along with the redesign comes LinkedIn News, a set of headlines aggregated from about 10,000 sites and blogs that are tailored to be directly relevant to a user's company, industry, and competitors. This feature is being rolled out to a limited number of LinkedIn users and will be more widely available in early 2008.

But of more interest to the geek crowd may be "InApps" (short for Intelligent Applications), LinkedIn's answer to the myriad developer platforms that have emerged in the wake of the Facebook Platform. But InApps won't bring food fights and zombies to LinkedIn, something that became clear early on when executives started hinting that the company would unveil a developer initiative. Rather, this will be a select group of productivity applications including internal widgets (a calendar of conferences, for example) and code for porting LinkedIn functions to external Web sites.

LinkedIn is also a partner in Google's somewhat stalled OpenSocial initiative, and the company has said that InApps' structure "(includes) the ability to develop applications that will run within LinkedIn using the OpenSocial development model."

"The goal of the Intelligent Applications Platform is to help make our users more effective by providing them with access to the intelligence of their professional network both on LinkedIn and on other sites they visit to get work done," LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye said in a statement. "Our focus is 100 percent professional, so we will be working with select business partners to build high value, high productivity applications."

One of LinkedIn's inaugural partners, BusinessWeek, has used InApps to create links on its Web site that lead to LinkedIn profiles and company information.

Business social network LinkedIn is following in Facebook's footsteps and opening up an application programming interface (API) to allow third-party developers to contribute to the site. But Dan Nye, the company's CEO, recently spoke with the New York Times' Saul Hansell and explained that it's going to be limited, in the interest of keeping things professional.

"We're not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other," Nye told the Times, in a not-so-subtle reference to the utter ridiculousness of many Facebook developer applications.

Rather, LinkedIn's platform API will invite developers, who must be pre-approved by the company to create two kinds of applications: one, applications that reach out to LinkedIn members' connections on other Web sites (the Times article mentioned, for example, Salesforce.com), and two, widgets for business functions like conference organization or travel planning.

Additionally, unlike Facebook, Nye said that LinkedIn is interested in profiting off its APIs, though he did not specify how.

Nye also said explicitly to the Times that he would like to eventually take the company public.