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How about this?

“Smart” businesses recognized that social networking could not easily be separated from “professional” networking, he argued.

“In today’s difficult business environment, the instinctive reaction can be to batten down the hatches and return to the traditional ‘command and control’ techniques that enable managers to closely monitor and measure productivity,” he said.

“Allowing workers to have more freedom and flexibility might seem counterintuitive, but it appears to create business more capable of maintaining stability.”

Social networking sites “good for businesses” (Reuters) by Reuters: Yahoo! Tech.

[You're reading http://BenMartinCAE.com. Yeah, you rock.]

Today Linkedin announces the roll out of several professional applications (like Facebook’s) based on Google’s Open Social platform. Sounds good in theory. They have some cools apps to choose from like Wordpress, Google Docs, Slideshare and TripIt. To add an application to your Linkedin profile, you go to Linkedin’s Applications page, select an app, and click install.

That’s when things get ugly. As you can see in these screenshots, every attempt I made to add an app failed. I thought the problem might be with Firefox, but I got the same error in IE7. Maybe Linkedin’s servers are failing under the demand, maybe the problem’s with Open Social, or maybe it’s the third party application providers that are flunking the test. In any case, it’s quite disappointing. Click the screenshots for a larger view:

The other disappointing thing is that the Wordpress application seems to only accept Wordpress.com blogs, not self-hosted blogs like this one (did ya notice the change?). But maybe this is just another server glitch.

In any case, I hope Linkedin can pull this together. The Wordpress and TripIt apps are ones I’d actually use.

Check out this video of what Linkedin hopes to deliver on with its applications features:

UPDATE: Well, it looks like some of these features were added to my profile despite the error messages. TripIt and Wordpress both added successfully. Slideshare is hanging at 80% of completion.