With over 17 million members, LinkedIn was listed last month on Web Pro News as the fastest growing social network. Today they are announcing three initiatives designed to cement their position as the premiere professional social network.

As a software professional, LinkedIn is part of what I refer to as my triad of social applications, the other two being Facebook and Twitter.  While LinkedIn was the first of these I used religiously it quickly took a back seat to the other two.  Interactions with my connections were restricted due to a limited mechanism.  Facebook provides multiple mechanisms for interaction including groups and multiple third party developed applications like SuperPoke, Visual Bookshelf and many others.  Of course Twitter is the ultimate in interaction.

LinkedIn became more of a static application for me, used mainly to research companies and the people inside them.  Obviously an application is only as good as what you put into it and many people have made LinkedIn their preference.  To me it became an archive of connections to be brought up on occasion to see if anyone has changed their employment.  Other services made it much easier to communicate with the people I wanted to keep in touch with.  I mostly make connections with LinkedIn but grow and cultivate them with Twitter and Facebook.

Today’s announcements may change the relevance of LinkedIn to me:

Redesigned Homepage
Current members have access to the beta version of a redesigned homepage.  The current site provides extremely limited customization of a personal dashboard.  The new site provides the mechanism for modules which paves the way for custom applications (a la Facebook).  Current modules on the beta site include People, Jobs and Answers.

Company News
LinkedIn will provide a custom feed aggregated from around 10,000 sites and blogs that is tailored to a user’s company, industry and competitors.  Articles will be ranked by relevance and popularity within your company network.  This feature is available to a limited number of users with full launch next year.

InApps
The Intelligent Applications Platform (InApps) was designed to allow for development of productivity applications and widgets along with a code base for implementing LinkedIn functionality in external sites.

I’m looking forward to the implementations of LinkedIn’s social graph in external sites.  Imagine logging into a job board such as Jobmatchbox.com and having access to a company’s key contacts on individual job listings.  LinkedIn has announced a partnership with Business Week magazine that will provide contact data on companies and individuals within their news articles.  Links will be provided to readers over keywords such as company names that will trigger a pop-up box detailing how many of their LinkedIn contacts are related to the company or keyword.

I had a concern about module’s being developed for use inside LinkedIn.  There is a risk of creating chaff and time sink applications that are best seen at Facebook.  LinkedIn seems to have the same concern and has reserved approval status of all deployed applications.  Lucian Beebe of LinkedIn’s Product Management team stated the following on their blog:

“Its going to be very different I think from what you see on other social networks.  Other social networks have very entertainment oriented applications or sometimes communication oriented applications.  These will be very business oriented.  We’ll maintain focus on business, on productivity.  So LinkedIn will always be a place you can come to get clear business utility.  But we’ll be able to open up to lots of people providing applications into LinkedIn so that now you’ll have a greater range of things you can do.“

Anyone interested in developing applications or just learning more about the InApps API set can contact LinkedIn at developer@linkedin.com.

LinkedIn continues to be a key application for professional networking.  The improvements will go a long way to turning it from a static application to more of an interactive usable social network.  After Facebook’s Beacon fiasco I have to wonder if we would have seen a migration to LinkedIn if these improvements were already in place.