>> DUNCAN: Hello from Google I/O. My name is Brandon Duncan and I'm the director of
engineering at LinkedIn. >> So do you want to talk about what are your
favorite OpenSocial 0.9 features? >> DUNCAN: Sure. So we recently upgraded to
OpenSocial 0.9 for our container on LinkedIn and there's lot of interesting new features.
But I think the one that really excites me the most is data pipelining. This is going
to allow us to create very performant applications because we're going to be able to provide
the third party partner with exactly the data that they need to render the view that they're
going to present to the user. We do that all in one shot so there's not a lot of network
traffic going between our data centers. This is going to provide our users with the best
experience on our site, hopefully to the point where they can't tell the difference between
what's natively the LinkedIn website and what's third party applications being served through
OpenSocial. So LinkedIn is the world's largest professional networking site. We've been around
for about six years and we have 41 million members. We recently, in the last year, implemented
an application platform based on OpenSocial technology. And we've done this because we
want to be able to tap into the wider developer community so that they can provide our users
with innovative new features as well as we recognize the fact that professionals in different
geographic locations may want to have features that tailors specifically to the way they
do business. And this, again, the platform allows us to take advantage of all these developers
who understand those local markets and can build professional applications that appeal
to people in those markets. >> And as developers, what are some of the
worst stories and lessons you learned from the technical challenge of using your product?
>> DUNCAN: So we've got a lot of interesting stories. I think one that I won't forget for
a long time is, we actually wanted to make our--we've been very focused on performance
for our OpenSocial platform and when we initially launched, we were actually creating the iframes
that hosted the third party applications dynamically using JavaScript. We wanted to move to more
of a static model, and we did that and we actually increased performance quite a bit,
but it turned out, the day before we were about to release this, we realized that it
wasn't working in Internet Explorer. So you just, you know, reiterated to us the fact
that even today you have to deal with cross browser compatibility issues, especially with
the technology like OpenSocial which is so heavily based on JavaScript, which, you know,
there's obviously quirks with the different browsers. So that definitely taught us, you
know, you don't want to spend three in the morning, the night before you're releasing
code, trying to debug things and firebug and using other tools, but, you know, we got through
that. But it definitely made me recognize that in the future as more browsers start
to leverage, things like HTML5, we're going to hopefully be able to standardize on a particular
method for doing cross iframe communications, which is one of the big stumbling blocks,
I guess, I would say in terms of the technology. >> So on containers, what's your favorite
app on your set? >> DUNCAN: Yes. So in terms of my favorite
application, I would have to say that that's the Company Buzz application. I think that's
the only one that I actually use pretty much every single day. It's really great because
it essentially--it takes all the twits that people are saying about LinkedIn or any other
company that I might be interested in, and it gives me that in a nice filtered view so
I can see what are the trends. Are more people twittering about my company today than yesterday?
Are they positive or negative? And I've actually found some interesting, you know, uses of
reported bugs, and I've found out about new features that people want simply by watching
Company Buzz. >> People are always worried about security.
How are you going to visit your security model? >> DUNCAN: Well, I think even more so at LinkedIn,
our users are very keen on making sure that their private data stays private because we've
got people who--they don't want to get spammed and don't necessarily want to be contacted.
So when we built this application platform, we were very concerned about, "Does the OpenSocial
standard provide for the rich set of APIs that we want to provide but at the same time
allow us to control and make sure that partners aren't abusing our system?" So for us, the
knowledge that partners are going to be authenticating with us using well-known standards like OAT,
you know, war-tested technologies, and the fact that the OpenSocial APIs allow us to
provide the partners back with a very granular set of field. So if a particular user said,
"I don't want my previous companies being shown on my profile," we can actually hide
that, and so when the developer asks us for this person's profile, we won't include those.
The standard allows us to do those things. >> How are the business-caucus users taking
advantage of the social platform? >> Well, being a professional network, we
certainly--we want to provide the every day professional with reason to come to LinkedIn,
and to actually get, you know, something valuable out of it. So take for example the Amazon
book reading application, a lot of people use Amazon and the type of reviews and information
that you can find about books on Amazon are really valuable. It helps you make purchasing
decisions as a consumer. But when you combine that with the social graph that LinkedIn provides
and the information that we know about people, now you can do really interesting things like,
for example, I might be a software engineer. It would be very useful for me to know what
are the books that senior software engineers or architects are reading right now. Or if
I'm in the real estate industry, what are other real estate professionals are reading.
So rather than just seeing reviews from a random cross section of the population like
I might see on Amazon, you're actually able to get more valuable information when you
combine that with the social graph, and OpenSocial is the technology that allows us to do that.
>> Brandon, we thank you for your time today and we wish you well.
>> DUNCAN: Sure. Thank you.