In case you missed the news, one of the largest business networking sites Linkedin have just launched their new platform for Opensocial applications.

In this initial phase of the platform rollout, Linkedin sensibly took the decision not to open the floodgates to developers and launch with just eight selected partners who could provide application features that are relevant and provide value for the core Linkedin userbase. Business deals aren’t made by virtual high-fiving the CEO of a multinational, and dream jobs aren’t won by poking your prospective employer—well at least not without the risk of legal action.

But enough about Linkedin’s launch from me; there’s lots in the blogosphere and the tech press out there. I want to focus on the most important and exciting aspect of this launch. That being the existence of online collaboration startup Huddle.net as one of the eight partners to be featured in the launch. They are the only UK-based partner—in fact the only one outside the US—and a company that I hold in very high regard… it is the company that I work for. It’s a very exciting time to see Huddle sitting up there against big heavyweights Google, Wordpress and Amazon. And, from the development team’s viewpoint, a somewhat frightening prospect too… scalability in code and hardware is a whole new ballgame.

So, without further ado, I present to you the result of a fair amount of blood, sweat and tears [not forgetting the coffee, cigarettes, beer and pizza] amongst my colleagues—it’s been an incredibly intense couple of months— the Huddle Workspaces application on Linkedin.

“Huddle Workspaces offers private online workspaces for secure team collaboration, document sharing and discussions within the LinkedIn network. Users receive 1Gb of free storage and can collaborate with unlimited connection.”

I’m unashamedly biased, but I do highly recommend you to go and get it installed and simply have a play. There’s a lot more going on in the app than anything else on Linkedin’s platform at the moment. It’s a shame that it’s the only properly interactive and genuinely collaborative tool available. All the others seem, at first glance, to suffer from that rather ugly social network trait of passive “look at me! look at me!” signposting and ignore the point of networking in the first place – to actively connect, engage and collaborate with likeminded people. So, in case you didn’t catch that… install Huddle Workspaces on Linkedin here.

Ok. I’ll stop with the shameless pimping. I do have sleep to catch up on. In future entries I want to write about the more interesting stuff of actually working with the Opensocial API. It’s currently a technology lacking general blog chatter. There are lots of questions out there, but usually with few answers; it was peculiar to discover Myspace as a technical resource. And the documentation is currently too dry/technical and lacking in ‘human’ explanation to be a sufficient one-stop Opensocial resource. If in fact there is something out there I missed, please let me know in the comments.

• Filed in web and javascript under huddle,linkedin,javascript,opensocial,collaboration
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