Opinion from ApiEvangelist: "Ultimately, the move by LInkedIn is no surprise to me, and the platform is purely a distribution channel for me, and has been for some time.. Meaning I only syndicate content there, and you will never find me actually engaging very deep on the platform, building relationships there, because along with other platforms like Quora I do not have any ownership over any of the exhaust I generate. As a professional this is unacceptable to me, as I have a valuable brand that I carefully maintain. As other professionals realize this, they too will mostly abandon the business social network, leaving it to be a spammy corner of the Internet where HR professional prey upon the semi-professional, aspiring employee types."
http://apievangelist.com/2015/02/12/changes-to-linkedin-deve...
Changes to Linkedin API Developer Program
21–24 of 24 posts
Re: Changes to Linkedin API Developer Program
#22Definitely could see this coming. While it's a shame that linkedin is closing down their API even more, they are just shooting themselves in the head which is great news :) Anyway, the future of professional social networks is destined to be rich ones for each profession/vertical, not the "crappy/high noise for everyone" linkedin model. I know I'm focusing more on crunchbase[0] and angellist[1] APIs for my startup. […
Hey srjk, I write for Gigaom and I'm hoping to talk to some developers about the news. Up for chatting about why you saw this coming awhile ago? if so, drop me a line at carmel.deamicis@gigaom.com
They have been moving into "sales intelligence". Their data/professional graph is a pretty big (maybe only) competitive advantage for the next year or two in that area. So, it follows that they would block off access for possible competitors and/or cordon off more data. This move became inevitable when they partitioned their API by "partner access" a while back.
However, this is great news :) It will just make linkedin irrelevant quicker. They are moving away from being a social network for professionals to being a source of sales intelligence. Most users wont be too happy with that. And, unlike facebook, linkedin is much easier to migrate off of. Really, linkedin was the first big professional network, not the last one.
IMHO angellist is more in line with what the future of professional networks is.
Re: Changes to Linkedin API Developer Program
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
For free or for money? I believe there are web scraping companies that sell monthly dumps of LinkedIn data, but I don't know off-hand how much something like that would cost. It would also likely depend on whether you wanted US-only data or worldwide.
Is this legal to scrape linkedin? What's the legality of obtaining + selling this information?
AFAIK, scraping is legal under US law because one does not have to circumvent any encryption to access the webpage. If LinkedIn will serve it to Google, Bing and others, then they'd be hard pressed to say "our HTML is secret."
Selling it is a different matter, and one that I don't have enough law background to answer. It may fall under the provision in US copyright law that says that facts are not copyrightable. So long as you are just selling the facts of the graph that they gladly serve to the Internet, ... again, I am not experienced enough to comment.
Re: Changes to Linkedin API Developer Program
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
For free or for money? I believe there are web scraping companies that sell monthly dumps of LinkedIn data, but I don't know off-hand how much something like that would cost. It would also likely depend on whether you wanted US-only data or worldwide.
US-only is fine. For money is potentially fine (I've no idea how much something like that would cost), if I knew it was legal - though if there was a legal way to get that data through scraping I'd probably just do that myself :)
As I mentioned in a sibling reply, legality depends on your jurisdiction but in the US AFAIK scraping is no different from connecting to LinkedIn 15,000,000 times with a copy of Chrome.
To further illustrate this point, LinkedIn provides a helpful directory at the bottom of their homepage, allowing one to browse every user[0] and every company[1] in their graph. Hard pressed to argue that it's illegal to navigate to every single profile if you serve a directory of them.
Also, I believe there are companies[2] and shops[3] that specialize in doing that kind of thing. I would say it would be worth reaching out to them, if nothing else just to get a sense for what something like that would cost.
0 = https://www.linkedin.com/directory/people-1-5-1/ 1 = https://www.linkedin.com/directory/companies 2 = http://scrapinghub.com/ (makers of the outstanding Scrapy framework!) 3 = http://webscrapinghelp.com