Linkedin And Fortune 500 Create The Ultimate Networking Tool

LinkedIn May 7, 2011 8 Comments

Linkedin have been opening up as a platform over the last few months and I’ve written numerous times about the great innovation coming out of that company. Their latest venture involves teaming up with the producers of the Fortune 500 list in America to create a stunning networking app that leverages the data within Linkedin and mashes it up with the Fortune 500 list to create the ultimate networking tool. I know plenty of sales people all over the world are crying out for something like this because it helps visualize their connections in a way that even the Linkedin site itself never could. The interesting thing about this app is that the 2 companies who created are saying that this is the very start of a much bigger partnership and it shows just how useful Linkedin is becoming and more importantly how tons of companies all over the world are leveraging the huge amount of useful data through the Linkedin APIs…

Video Explanation

As you can see form the video the app mashes up the information that Fortune already have and mixes it with your Linkedin data to help you create a better understanding of the company and who you might know there. As you can see the data is presented in a super easy format to digest and it gives you a rich media experience that you might not have had otherwise.

Data Is The Future

Reid Hoffman who is the founder of Linkedin often talks about data being at the core of Web 3.0 and there is no better of that in practice than this. This app pulls several different data sets in to one place and makes the data easy to digest for the consumer and massively practical. As Linkedin say themselves

Yesterday, the Fortune 500+ Web app went live. The program takes our annual Fortune 500 list — the foremost method for ranking business — and turns it into a vital tool for doing business. Users can target 1,000 of the biggest companies in the U.S., find the right ones to meet with, track breaking news and Twitter traffic, and build, map and share lists of prospects.

Although the product has only just been rolled out and is only available for American companies we can expect to see lots more of these great examples of people using the brilliant data that is available within Linkedin. It’s going to be an exciting time for Linkedin as people leverage the platform and just in the same way as Facebook has evolved away from just being a website in to a fully blown platform that is what we are seeing with here.

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