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Social networking has been around before the new millennium with several sites trying to bring people together. But since the advancements of web development started surfacing, new online social networking sites were made and has since became the center of attention by a large majority of internet users. Right now, hundreds of services are competing for the best social networking site in hopes of getting more people on board or getting acquired by a top corporation. Improves of one social networking site usually affect other online services to improve and show similar improvements.

LinkedIn is one of those services with an entirely different approach. LinkedIn doesn’t head in the battlefield of social networks because there are enough social networking sites in the circle. LinkedIn plays it differently by targeting the professionals only so they can establish a social network with its own identity giving people a reason to join no matter what social network they are currently in. LinkedIn started roughly the same time as the other social networking big boys back in 2003 and since their exploding growth, other online services started to get affected in a good way. Here are some of the online services that have made changes to connect with LinkedIn better.

E-mail Services

LinkedIn users will never give up their business e-mail addresses just to use LinkedIn so now LinkedIn has provided a good way in finding new LinkedIn contacts by allowing LinkedIn to search through contacts of the top webmail providers, which are Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and AOL. This integration makes it very easy in adding people without too much work in exporting contacts and performing multiple copy/pastes.

Online Contact Managers

Several laptop users encounter the frustration of suffering from data corruption and loss and some of that data can include important contacts for business purposes. This is why more people started to lean on online contact managers instead because they know their data is safe and they profile more functionality and features compared to standard webmail services.

Since these online contact managers have similar visions, LinkedIn decided to partner with the ones that are willing, like Plaxo, a popular online contact manager that has over 20 million users registered. Now the two communities are joined because of the ability to sync LinkedIn contacts with Plaxo in a similar fashion to the way it syncs to E-mail accounts. The people that benefit here are mainly the users because they no longer need to login both networks unless extremely necessary.

Job Search Engines

These services are fairly obvious because LinkedIn is all about job creation and so are the job search engines leaving them both having a good chemistry. Of course, some of them may show up to be strongly competitive, but some job search engines like Simply Hired. Simply Hired is just one of the companies that believe that using LinkedIn’s newly released API would benefit on their behalf. Now jobseekers that are registered at Simply Hired can easily find job postings that are made by LinkedIn connections.

LinkedIn is continuing to make an impact in online services including other social networking sites. Integration is a good thing and it will help both sides grow their respective networks.