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Betrayed by LinkedIn

developer.linkedin.com

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Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#31

Post by sp4rki »

watty wrote: post #8
mtkd wrote: post #7

A business model based 100% on a 3rd party social graph API is not a business model. I hope they can pivot the work they've done to something more standalone.

Why do you think this? It's certainly riskier but there have been many successful companies that start out relying heavily on a 3rd party APIs.

Because there is no competition. If you decide to build rocket launchers and the company you source, say the warheads for the rockets, starts sending you lemons (rockets without the high yield explosives you used to get for example), you start sourcing your warheads from someone else. Hell build you own and get on with it.

Now if a company patents a specific warhead that only they can make and you decide to make a rocket launcher that is made specifically to launch rockets with those warheads and no other warheads are compatible with your launcher and suddenly the source company decides that their warheads suck anyways, you just lost your business.

My Takarov can fire any type of 7.62×25mm Takarov ammunition, albiet some is better than others. If it could only fire a specific type of surplus ammo that might not longer be available tomorrow, my gun could end up being useless in a blink of an eye.

Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#33

Post by smoyer »

As a LinkedIn user, I'm actually relieved that they're considering my privacy. And with regards to the API behaving like the web page, there's a big difference to me between a machine scraping my data and a human looking at my profile (one might just be interested, the other is trying to use me for something).

Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#34

Post by tocomment »

One time I decided to spruce up my job title on linked in to better reflect what I do.

Well the next day I was hearing from people I hadn't talked to in years congratulating me on my promotion! It turns out Linked in had emailed my connections and said I got a promotion. That was pretty creepy. I need to turn that off somehow I guess.

Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#36

Post by danvoell »

They have also been betraying their customers. Information that used to be available via common search is now behind the "paywall". If you don't know someone, you basically can see their picture, name, job, company and a little more. Which means, I am putting up my information for friends or people who pay money for my information.

Obviously they have investors and a business to run, but it's just more of the same bs.

Perhaps there should be some soft of NO IPO, NO VC standard moral code page, which basically tells customers, we aren't going to screw you on behalf of the few. I would sign up in a second.

Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#37

Post by danvoell »

They have also been betraying their standard users. Information that used to be available via common search is now behind the "paywall". If you don't know someone, you basically can see their picture, name, job, company and a little more. Which means, I am putting up my information for friends or people who pay money for my information.

Obviously they have investors and a business to run, but it's just more of the same bs.

Perhaps websites should have some sort of NO IPO, NO VC standard moral code page, which basically tells customers, we aren't going to screw you on behalf of the few. I would sign up in a second.

Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#38

Post by unreal37 »

This is an overly dramatic response. And flagging because the author of the overly dramatic response self-posted this to HN.

Spending a year "and investors money" developing two applications that rely so heavily on being able to pull peoples past job titles that when the policy turns out to be different you have to start all over? That's not a business model.

Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#39

Post by floppydisk »

toyg wrote: post #4

This is the risk of building your business on somebody else's platform; there's always a degree of sharecropping involved, and in this realm, landowners are not bound to any law. I wonder how many "big" startups will offer APIs from now on. Many API-friendly services (delicious, twitter) have changed their stance, and Google didn't even want to release an API for G+. Many "new" APIs are basically useless, as companie…

The "tale" of many of the big startups you mentioned is that they still can't figure out how to effectively monetize their platforms. For instance, if you look at Twitter, they made a huge push to get the developer ecosystem to fill in holes Twitter itself couldn't cover; the end result being a growing community and revenue streams Twitter got nothing from. Seeing this, I think Twitter came to the belief they needed to completely control their platform in order to monetize it, so they severely curtailed the development ecosystem and tried to inject themselves into as many revenue streams as possible. I think the end result will be companies that view themselves as content companies will issue severely restricted APIs and companies that view themselves more as data companies (i.e. Factual http://www.factual.com/ Standard I don't work there but like what they're doing disclaimer applies here) will push APIs out the door because they want to be the data provider whose integrated into every application possible.

Re: Betrayed by LinkedIn

#40

Post by ssharp »

Suppose I owned a shoe store and the only supplier I chose to work with was Nike. I built my store on top of Nike's product, became an expert at it, had lots of customers and knew the market well. One day, Nike sees how many orders I've been making lately and decides to cut off my supply and open a Nike Store in my town. No contract with Nike, I'm SOL. I start wishing I had diversified my supply a little more.

In traditional business, there is a known threat to nearly all companies called "supplier power". If the power your suppliers have on you is strong, you're in a weak position and should try and increase your power over the supplier. I don't know if this is unavoidable or it's simply neglected within the tech community, but I'm never shocked when APIs get restricted or shut down by their parent company when others are monieizing it.

There have been enough high-profile examples over the past year or two that any business relying on a data pipe from another company needs to be on top of the relationship. The business itself should also be figuring out ways to protect itself should the pipe become clogged or shut off all the way.

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