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Back in the early days when LinkedIn was still growing, LinkedIn was considered a social networking site with high goals of gathering professionals across the globe into a single community where professionals that know each other can connect and keep in touch professionally using the unique features that LinkedIn has to offer. LinkedIn continues to grow even now and the developers have been hard at work developing new features that can attract new users and encourage existing members to use their services even more.

This plan has worked with the successful implementation of the application platform and other free features like the popular LinkedIn Answers where people can seek professional help from the community. But these nifty features do not take the full credit alone in LinkedIn’s growth because LinkedIn’s coverage is a lot larger than some people may think.

In fact, LinkedIn has become so widely used that other developers have been looking into putting LinkedIn features into their applications so that people can use LinkedIn functions without depending on their browser. There aren’t many at the moment, but with LinkedIn’s number of registered users growing every day, more applications will provide LinkedIn support in the future. Here are a few that are working right now.

Digsby

Digsby is an instant messaging application that has been receiving a lot of attention since its first release last February 2008. This is because Digsby is and will remain as a free application and its seamless integration with instant messaging networks, e-mail accounts, and social networking sites attracted so many people in taking the application for a spin. The concept and design was appreciated by the majority and now the Digsby team has been hard at work ironing out bugs and adding new features to their highly anticipated software.

One of the features added to a recent build was LinkedIn support and that has caused nothing but praise for both existing Digsby users and LinkedIn loyalists. Currently, Digsby allows fetching the newsfeed from LinkedIn and checking for new messages from the program. You can also set your status from Digsby, making it a good start for Digsby lovers to dive into LinkedIn without any worries. More features may come as things progress.

Xobni

Despite the numerous online services available for managing contacts and e-mail, a good number of people still use Microsoft Outlook to manage their contacts so they can access them offline. Microsoft Outlook has served people on the go for many years, but never ended up to be a perfect personal information manager due to its limited searching capabilities. Xobni fills in that role by offering a faster search for cluttered inboxes. Because people who use Xobni with Outlook are most likely professionals on the go, LinkedIn and Xobni partnered to add LinkedIn support to contacts so that LinkedIn information can be displayed on the Xobni sidebar. This shows some basic information fetched from the LinkedIn profile including the number of connections the person has and a convenient link to his or her LinkedIn profile. Contact management now meets professional social networking in Xobni.

These are just some of the programs that have been getting better reception since LinkedIn was implemented. More applications should adapt because LinkedIn is expanding and adding even more features.