We’re sorry, but the page you requested could not be found. This may be because:

The page you are looking for no longer exists. Perhaps you can return back to the site’s homepage

An official client for the LinkedIn professional social network has been a long time coming, but it looks like the third-party stopgaps will soon be relieved of duty. LinkedIn for Android is now available in an open beta if you sign up for the group. All of the core functions are there, like viewing updates from your professional contacts, browsing profiles, handling invitations, and searching for particular people.

If you’ve never signed up, LinkedIn is a social network specifically for professional identities; you can show your work history, ask for recommendations, and try to get references to connect with folks outside of your usual sphere. LinkedIn exists pretty separately from Facebook, though there’s definitely a lot of overlapping users.

Only Android 2.1 devices and up are supported for the new mobile client, and since it’s in beta and not in the Market yet, you’ll need to be able to install non-market apps. If you’re packing a BlackBerry, you can find it in App World, or for iPhone, hit up the widget below.

About The Author Simon Sage

Simon Sage’s education largely surrounded writing, technology and online community, leading him to begin his blogging career at BlackBerryCool.com and to quickly discover a vibrant and active community surrounding BlackBerry and mobile technology. In exploring RIM’s platform, he has learned what enterprises are looking for in mobility as well as what makes the innocuous BlackBerry so appealing to them. Recently Simon’s been covering RIM’s gradual move into an already-crowded consumer market, and the impact of burgeoning challengers, such as the iPhone, as well as long-time leaders, like Nokia, on BlackBerry’s advancement.With plenty of content under his belt, Simon will be branching off a bit to see what other smartphone manufacturers are working on while still using BlackBerry as a barometer. At IntoMobile, you can count on his posts being even-handed, well-informed and thought-out.

​Today in subway porn we have a beautiful depiction of the ebb and flow and changing formats of the New York City subway map over the years. The only thing better than watching the map come of age to the inspirationally epic music in the video created by Gizmodo’s Matt Toder back in December (Bowery Boogie reminded us of it today) would be actually holding one of those early 1900s parchments in our hands. Though, probably, we’d accidentally tear it or spill coffee on it and then get sued, so this is really better, anyway.

And, yes, we know we are transportation nerds, but isn’t there a certain frisson of delight that comes at the end, when the subway map is as familiar as an old friend frenemy? Either that or we have Stockholm Syndrome.

Fun fact: Once upon a time, the train lines all started in Brooklyn. Watch the video here.

Related: The NYC Subway from Birth to Now, in One Gif

100 Years Later: The Evolution of the NYC Subway Map [Gizmodo via Bowery Boogie]

[JDoll / @thisisjendoll]Go to Runnin’ Scared for all our latest news coverage.

In the process, they injected more than $30 billion into the city’s economy and supported 320,000 jobs. Think about that the next time you see a family buying Statue of Liberty geegaws.

And, crowded sidewalks and all, New Yorkers welcome visitors with hospitality, as Daily News reporter Rich Schapiro discovered when he ventured out into bustling midtown streets disguised as a bumbling tourist.

He got not the least bit of lip for his suitcase-toting, map-unfurling clumsiness. To the contrary, Schapiro got offers of help. No surprise there.

Then again, when he was out of disguise and traveling back to the office as a regular New Yorker, he idled near open subway doors.

For which he earned a proper hometown rebuke: “Hey, man! Get outta the way!”

Hell of a town, ain’t it?

We’re sorry, but the requested page could not be found.

You might want to start with one of the following links:

• The Post and Courier homepage
• The Post and Courier search page
• Local news
• Business
• Sports
• Features
• Classifieds

You may not be able to find this page because of:

• An out-of-date bookmark/favorite
• A search engine that has an out-of-date listing for postandcourier.com
• A mis-typed address

Please use the below form for reporting errors and problems in postandcourier.com.

Provide the exact web address by copy/pasting it into the form below and give all pertinent information so we can track down the problem and fix it as quickly as possible.

You are circling the block yet again, desperately seeking a parking space–and then you remember there’s an app for that. You whip out your phone and pull up Roadify, the high-profile winner of New York City’s second BigApps contest, which is supposed to provide a real-time list of parking spaces near your location. You watch as Roadify loads and quickly discover there are no free parking spaces within a 10-mile radius of where you are currently circling the block. This shouldn’t surprise you because there are usually almost no parking spaces listed in the app, rendering it fairly useless. Then, as you slam on your breaks to avoid hitting a pedestrian, you remember that driving while using your phone is difficult, dangerous, and often illegal.

And this is the app that won?

Undeterred by Roadify’s failure, the city announced the third installment of the BigApps contest in September, in which the city awards $50,000 in cash to the best app that uses city data. So far the first two contests have yielded apps that have received a fair amount of media attention but have lagged in user adoption. Sportify, another winner that garnered a lot of press, also relies on a critical mass of users to function. It, too, is a great idea in principle (find people near you who want to play pickup sports!), which has yet to catch on. All of this is the predictable result of the city’s approach to digital development, which focuses on plenty of sizzle, not much steak. It’s time for the city to deeply explore what New York’s citizens actually need, and the ways in which those citizens are likely to behave.

In the professional digital development world, website and app development begins with a deep look at what the end users need, and how they are likely to use sites and apps in the course of their day. The problem with the BigApps contest is that it leaves both user needs and likely user behavior out of the equation, instead beginning with an enormous data dump and asking developers to make something cool out of it. Sure, it would be great to have an app that tells me where I can find a parking spot, but does it have any relationship to how people are likely to behave? Apparently not. And yes, it would be neat to find a local pickup game in my neighborhood, but is that something residents of New York City actually need? Some quick user experience work would have made this abundantly obvious and saved the city $50,000.

These missteps tend to be true with all of New York City’s digital efforts. Was anyone thinking about user behavior when they printed a long URL on all subway maps directing subway riders to a buried page on the MTA website to find out about service changes? Subway riders who were underground and therefore unable to access the web? The new pilot program allowing bus riders to text for the location of their bus offers another example of what not to do. Bus riders who text a number posted at their bus stop are rewarded with a text back from the MTA that says something like “your bus is 0.8 miles away.”

I suppose in some city, somewhere, 0.8 miles might be a meaningful designation for the distance between two points, but in Brooklyn, where the program is being piloted, it leaves riders with exactly the same knowledge about their bus’s whereabouts they would have had before texting. Is 0.8 miles very far away? Is there traffic? Why not text back the location of the bus (“Your bus is at Atlantic and Court St.”), or an estimated arrival time, both of which should be easily calculable based on the user’s location and average bus travel times? Instead of just throwing technology at New Yorkers purely for technology’s sake, why not start by spending $50,000 on talking to the people who live in the city and finding out what they really need?

In other cities they take digital seriously. Boston, for example, won the Digital Cities award for their Citizens Connect website and app, which allows Boston residents to access nearly all government services online. Need a birth certificate? Done. Want to get a pothole filled? Done. Best of all, Boston was able to do all of this with a budget of $25,000.

But the biggest success for Boston is that people actually use the app and the website, unlike the BigApps contest winners. And this is because Citizens Connect takes into account the needs of the citizens of Boston. The starting point for its development wasn’t, “Hey, let’s make something neat.” Instead, the team took a look at Boston’s 24-hour call center system and tried to figure out how they could get people’s questions answered more efficiently. In other words, the team started with the end users of the system, understood what people needed, and went from there.

New York City also lags far behind Louisville, Kentucky, another Digital Cities winner, whose website greets users with links to information on drivers’ licenses, garbage pickups, and permit applications among other items that clearly match up with the reasons citizens would visit the website. New York City’s website, by contrast, provides a quick link to the new New York City Food website as the most prominent call to action, clearly matching up with the goals of someone in the media relations or publicity department. It is possible to access some New York City services online, but information is spread out over 100 websites, each with a different UI, all presented in a giant list as though purchasing a Queens Midtown Tunnel magnet is as important as knowing when to put out the recycling. And the widely publicized “Re-Invent NYC.gov Hackathon” held over the summer is only going to encourage more Roadify-like ideas, rather than address what people really need out of the city’s website.

Mayor Bloomberg has taken several public actions indicating that he’s interested in making New York into a truly digital city, but the approach the city takes always ignores the most important aspect of creating a digital entity: the people who live here.

Those people want to be able to find the school lunch calendar (I challenge you to try and find it now in under an hour), learn how to handle a speeding ticket (currently a Kafkaesque process online), and find out how to appropriately dispose of paint thinner (not possible as far as I can tell). Once all of that has been accomplished, then we can turn to apps for organizing pickup games. But only if that’s what the people want.

[Image: Flickr User AndrewHavis]

Hana Schank is a Principal at Collective User Experience. Follow her on Twitter.

LinkedIn, the business-targeted social networking website, recently filed for an IPO, meaning that it will soon sell public shares in the company. The Mountain View, CA-based company is one of the first high-profile networking corporations to enter the public domain.

Filing this request with the Securities and Exchange Committee (SEC), LinkedIn declined to comment on the number of shares that will be made available and their price range. However, the listing documents from this case give us one of the first looks into the profitability of large social sites.

During the first nine months of 2010, the professional networking brought in $165 million in revenue, grossing $1.85 million as a net income. The past year was financially strong considering the fact that LinkedIn lost $3.4 million during the same time period a year earlier. The company made stated that it does not expect to be profitable this year due to increased investment in infrastructure and expansion.

Though many online companies survive on advertising revenue alone, LinkedIn has a three-pronged approach – premium subscriptions, hiring solutions for resource managers and advertisements.  This diversification makes the company stronger, a sentiment affirmed by industry analyst Debra Aho Williamson:

The more diverse your business can become, the less exposure you have if there is downfall in a certain market. You want to see a rounded business.

Rather negatively, the company did say that it does not have a substantial majority of users visit on a monthly basis. In addition to this, LinkedIn is one of the smaller networking sites. Facebook, a competitor to the business-targeted site, reported $1.2 billion in revenue during the first nine months of 2010, raising questions as to how strong this investment would be.

Nevertheless, LinkedIn’s implied value is floating around $2.5 billion and they will only be selling around 10 percent of it to facilitate international expansion.

What do you think? Will LinkedIn’s IPO encourage other social networking sites to jump on the public bandwagon? Will LinkedIn survive as a public corporation? Let us know in the comments below.

[via The Wall Street Journal]

Leave A Comment