Mart Muller's Weblog

Two interesting sessions at the Dutch Information Worker User Group event @ Wortell this time.

Subscribe at http://www.diwug.nl/ for free.

After the news about the .Net Facebook SDK, LinkedIn has released an API to integrate LinkedIn in your own applications. LinkedIn uses OAuth to authenticate.

“The LinkedIn API utilizes OAuth as its authentication method. OAuth is a standard model for negotiating developer authorization  and granting access on behalf of specific users for performing API requests. One of OAuth's strengths are the many third party and open source libraries that exist, allowing developers to authenticate with LinkedIn quickly and in a similar manner to how they may authenticate with services like Twitter, Google, Yahoo, and Netflix.”

More info: http://developer.linkedin.com/

Via: http://team.silverlight.net/announcement/announcing-the-new-microsoft-sdk-for-facebook-platform/

“Today, as part of our ongoing collaboration with Facebook, we released a very exciting new developer resource: the Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform (http://www.microsoft.com/facebooksdk). This SDK combines the power of Web, client and social technologies to enable millions of developers to transform their imagination into next generation application experiences. We look forward to seeing the creative applications that developers will create for Facebook that will open up new avenues for users to share and connect with their friends.”

Nice to see the new social networking accelerator for Microsoft CRM, integrating Twitter in a business application.

Check the press release

After my last post I got some positive comments on the LinkedIn custom field type I wrote. One of the issues with LinkedIn is the way they expose their data for mashups. The only thing you can use directly is the script widget for embedding company information (see previous post).

This weekend, I expanded the custom field types with a LinkedIn userprofile page:

Which generates a LinkedIn icon with a link to the profile of the user:

and

I got a tip from my old colleague Jasper about someone who built an application that grabs the LinkedIn information from profile pages. Dirty way, but it works for now and it gives a nice XML file with all the profile data.

A nice opportunity to build some more functionality: a LinkedIn Webpart!

Now it only shows some user data, but it can easily be extended with blog postings, job history, groups etc, etc.

Like I promised, I will post the WSP later on :)