LinkedIn's New Free Apps: Review, Part Two
Here's a look at the rest of LinkedIn's apps currently available on the new LinkedIn App Platform. They run the gamut, from presentations to file sharing to what you're reading.
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There are two main tabs: "By me," which is where you display your blog; or "My contacts," which shows the blogs of your connections. If you don't have a blog, the "by me" tab will simply be left empty.
The Wordpress blog app for LinkedIn, on the other hand, only works to share Wordpress-based blogs.
We recommend installing either of these blogging apps only if you yourself enjoy blogging. While Blog Link can be useful without a blog, you can easily get a feed of your favorite blogs via RSS, making a blogging app largely unnecessary.
Huddle
Huddle allows you to upload any kind of file to the Huddle Widget box on your LinkedIn profile (provided you've installed the app). You can upload files up to 10 MB in size (beyond that, you need a Huddle.net account).
But Huddle for LinkedIn has pretty robust sharing capabilities. You can invite contacts to your Huddle workspace and have them upload files. You can also create discussions in the application as well.
As we noted in our first LinkedIn review regarding box.net — another file sharing application — we'd remind you to be careful what company files you share.
SlideShare
The SlideShare App for LinkedIn does something rather fun: it makes those PowerPoint presentations not only available for your connections to view, but it opens them up to discussions and comments.
We think this could be especially helpful before you give a presentation in person to a group. You could share a presentation with your connections and allow them to give you feedback via the comments section. For now, this makes it slightly more robust than the Google Presentations app for LinkedIn that we reviewed in part one, which lacks such a feature.
The only drawback to this is app that to realize most of its potential (such as embedding SlideShare presentations on other websites or your blog) you really need a SlideShare account. But on the upside, the SlideShare LinkedIn app allows you to sign up without ever leaving LinkedIn. And it's free.
Polling
This one is created by LinkedIn. Much like the staple Question and Answer section of LinkedIn, the polling app allows you to query your connections about some burning question you might have.
The main difference is the Polling app returns rich looking charts with their answers. If you're just looking to poll your connections, then the free version of this app might work well for you.
If you're looking for more robust capabilities, like, say, polling large groups within the LinkedIn user base, each response will cost you $50 (minimum).
