Reid: Well, we do have plans which we have been working although we have not announced a specific date on for releasing a platform on the website-that is in the not too distant future. And our goal will be to have a platform where people can build new kinds of business apps on. Now we were going to be very careful about how we allow and enable apps on it because it is very important to us that we keep to our professional knitting. So, for example, if someone were trying to launch a dating service on LinkedIn, we would actually just forbid it and part of reason of that is like you know, for example for someone who is married, it’s perfectly cool to be on LinkedIn. There are no dating components. There is nothing that would make their partner think weirdly about what they are doing on LinkedIn. So we will be careful about what we approve, but the idea would be to allow a number of different parties-- LinkedIn and parties other than LinkedIn to develop applications on the LinkedIn platform.
Kamla: Here is a question that I got from somebody in India. They say that if one compared MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, each seems to have found a space and an audience of its own. How much of this was strategic calls that LinkedIn made very early on and how much of it is a work-in-progress? This person wants to understand the release process and I guess, is a product development question and this is something that would be very relevant for a lot of Indian listeners.
Reid: So from LinkedIn perspective, it was very deliberate from early days. Because I invested in Series A and Friendster the same time I was starting with LinkedIn. I hadn’t invested in Facebook at that time. So I thought Friendster will be social and LinkedIn will be the professional. Those two need to be very different. For example how do you want to present yourself in a dating context? I want be fun. I am bold and attractive etc. These are not how you want to present yourself on a professional context. How you want to present yourself to your prospective or your current boss, colleagues, etc. And we made a very distinct-deliberate distinction to keep them separate. Now the metaphor that I frequently use when we are talking about the three current giants’ is: MySpace is the bar, Facebook is home and LinkedIn is the office.
Kamla: So there is got to be some commonality between the three?
Reid: In fact that is a part of the reason for this. For example, are there people that you are friends with, they are also who you work with? Absolutely. There is some overlap. But what you do there, how you present yourself, what is the set of activities, what are the things that you are trying to accomplish are in fact different in each of these three places.
Kamla: What are some of the major features that we can expect by the end of 2008, that maybe relevant for people outside of the US?
Reid: We are building features on a global network so hopefully they are relevant to everybody. That is the least what we aspire to do. We have some great new releases and groups coming. We have already made some releases in the last few days but there are more coming on that. We have some new interesting evolutions in the profile that we think will be helpful. Then we have some additional big releases coming but they are still under wraps from a PR perspective.
Kamla: Have there been any interesting anecdotes that you could share with people? People have used LinkedIn in very surprising ways.