I think this is where the non-hacker founder can get completely trounced by a hacker-founder.
As smart as the guy is, Reid Hoffman has dragged his feet on letting people insert third party applications even since MySpace widgets started exploding. I don't think he really gets the leverage these platforms give a programmer, because he's not one.
Hoffman was also an investor and on the board of Friendster. Another company that totally missed the boat on becoming a social platform.
Now perhaps he finally is starting to get it. Too bad he's not a hacker and is therefore at the mercy of his development team, which is going to need 9 months to release anything.
This isn't really a hacker/non-hacker issue, its just an issue of having vision, and having good people with good ideas. A company that relies solely on its founder for innovation is not a healthy company.
I don't have much love for third party widgets. Their inclusion on Facebook has cluttered up the service. For people who are using websites as tools to accomplish tasks, I don't see 3rd party widgets as a compelling feature. Like Facebook, LinkedIn is also a social network, but it differs as it is fundamentally a tool rather than a toy.
So far widgets have been toys, some of them excellent toys, but toys none the less. Its a hell of a genie's bottle to open up in exchange for apps like TopFriends, iLike, and the option to draw a mustache on your friend's profile picture. I realize that the creation of tool-widgets is possible, but I am still waiting to see if the effort of developing a public API is worth the return in tool functionality (LinkedIn will probably survive without the inclusion of TopConnections, and ConnectionsIdTotallySleepWith apps ;).
To address a few other points, Friendster failed to get on the boat because it had immense technical problems leading to its stability/usability plummeting like Wall Street trader jumping out of a window on black Friday. They probably would have also missed the boat on developing an API, but this is what happens at poorly lead companies: they fail catastrophically. My last thought is that after a company becomes sufficiently large, having a hacker leader who wants to build the public API by himself may be less of an asset than a disaster. Facebook released their API quickly, and they released it incomplete and with shoddy support and documentation. They've happened to get a blankcheck for good publicity... but others may not be so fortunate.
As smart as the guy is, Reid Hoffman has dragged his feet on letting people insert third party applications even since MySpace widgets started exploding. I don't think he really gets the leverage these platforms give a programmer, because he's not one.
Hoffman was also an investor and on the board of Friendster. Another company that totally missed the boat on becoming a social platform.
Now perhaps he finally is starting to get it. Too bad he's not a hacker and is therefore at the mercy of his development team, which is going to need 9 months to release anything.