Career-minded social network LinkedIn has finally released version 1.0 of its Android app, bringing the site’s functionality onto the number one smartphone OS in the U.S.. While LinkedIn has had an iPhone app since 2008, it only just recently began testing an app for Android.
The app has been in beta testing but today becomes available to all in the Android Market, giving LinkedIn users the ability to view updates, search, message and more.
In its continuing push to become more social and not just an online directory of resumes and references, career-minded social network LinkedIn has taken a couple pages from Facebook and Twitter. This move, however, didn’t need much in the way of a precedent.
The company explains LinkedIn for Android as “a continuation of our efforts to help you leverage the power of your professional network anywhere, anytime.”
The app has six distinct functions or “modules” – updates, search, connections, invitations, messages and “reconnect”. With these, users can view timeline updates, search for users from within connections and the entire LinkedIn user base, respond to invitations, and send and receive InMail messages. The “connections” module acts as your LinkedIn “address book in the cloud” and “reconnect” provides connection suggestions.
While I don’t imagine I will be looking for connection suggestions on my phone, the ability to quickly look up user profiles before a meeting sounds like a great feature. Have a meeting and don’t know much about the person you’re meeting with? Check out LinkedIn and you can get a full background.
We’d love to see this integrated with recent LinkedIn acquisition CardMunch and even a business card alternative service like Hashable or CardCloud.
