Smile, You're on LinkedIn

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A Different Kind of Club

Including photos isn't a response to Facebook's popularity, says LinkedIn's Luo. "There is buzz about Facebook moving into the professional arena," she says. But LinkedIn helps people expand their professional networks in part because of the participation of many higher-level executives who are unlikely to join other networks. "To be a useful professional network, you have to have the people above you on the network," Luo says.

Indeed, LinkedIn has long debated whether to include photos, Luo says. As recently as an August interview, LinkedIn's co-founder and president Reid Hoffman said "photos and business don't go together," partly because images could unduly influence recruiters. To lessen that threat, LinkedIn is letting HR reps turn off the feature so they can screen candidates without regard to age, race, and appearance.

Retention Concerns

Hoffman says the company for the past year has been working on an application programming interface that would let outside developers use some of LinkedIn's data in their programs, and plans to release the technology by the spring of 2008. Hoffman gives the hypothetical example of a user of Salesforce.com's customer management software being able to view the LinkedIn profiles for their leads without having to navigate to the LinkedIn site.

Whatever LinkedIn's reason for adding photos, it will need to confront the bigger question of how big an appetite users and software developers will have for a proliferating number of social networks. Traditional media companies and Web outfits are trying to make social networking less of a destination and more of a feature. For instance, Yahoo! (YHOO), Viacom's (VIA) MTV.com, and eBay (EBAY) are all adding networking features (BusinessWeek, 9/24/07).

The trend will likely accelerate in 2008, forcing users and developers to make harder choices about where to spend time online. "Social networking is going to be a feature in lots of places," says Jupiter's Parr. People are going to start picking and choosing where they make their home." Amid the land rush, LinkedIn wants to make its high-earning devotees don't stray too far from the cosseted quarters it's built.

Ricadela is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in Silicon Valley.