Marshall Kirkpatrick provides this detailed assessment of the new LinkedIn Developers Portal here. My take is that we can expect more, cool mashups that incorporate data from LinkedIn Profiles and status announcements. Marshall laments two things: One is the ambiguous terms and conditions that may cast a chill on development of new applications that can be construed to compete with LinkedIn. He also expresses some consternation about the potential of LinkedIn to become more like Twitter.

From the point of view of Recombinant Telephony, I note a dearth of hooks into the world of the phone and voice services. He mentions that “you can find the LinkedIn accounts of people you’re connected to on other networks”, but there is no mention of an ability to connect over a soft-phone, chat or video function. There is the specter of a threat that you won’t be able to make an iPhone app if it is perceived to compete with something that LinkedIn’s developers have on their to-do lists.

Let’s see where the portal takes us. An informal poll at the Dreamforce, Salesforce.com’s user, developer and analysts gathering last week, an informal poll of attendees indicated that Facebook is turning out to be the social network for personal activity while LinkedIn plays that role for one’s professional life. The next step is for the Telephony API crowd to build more phone functions into the basic applications.

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