Today I spent a few minutes checking to see if the LinkedIn API is available yet.  Many months back I looked into the possibility of integrating LinkedIn with a Twitter client I was (and still am) building.  So I applied for access to the LinkedIn API and got no response at all from LinkedIn.  Zip.  Zero.  And this is not something unique to me either.

So today I thought I'd just take a look again as it was always stated that LinkedIn would be releasing a "public API" for everyone to use, and I decided to take a look again, and came across this post on the LinkedIn blog post on the LinkedIn blog, posted on 11/9 (yesterday as of this writing).

I may be overly sensitive, but I can not tell you how much this upsets me.  LinkedIn took it upon themselves to keep their API private so that they can roll out integration with Twitter on their own instead of promoting open innovation in the community.  Sure it is their right to do this, but it is just not in the spirit of how things work today.  I know of many people who wanted to provide these capabilities and were just simply blocked by LinkedIn from doing such.

Particularly grievous to me is that they went and did this integration with Twitter (instead of some other service, say Facebook) whose model has always been "Here's our API - you go and innovate."  In that sense I guess I am also not very happy with Twitter going ahead and doing this as it just seems unfair to me that they would promote integration with another system that has a closed API.

LinkedIn, get your act together and play nicely with the other kids.