We live in a global economy and now more than ever, collaborating across borders is a reality for professionals all over the world. Whether we are looking for a trusted partner or understanding how to approach a potential client, we all must reach beyond our national frontiers and seek knowledge through people we know and trust.

So I am happy to announce that starting today, we are extending the benefits of LinkedIn to all the Spanish speakers of the world. Check out a video of me, Patrick and many other colleagues as we welcome you en español!

If I could speak Spanish, here's what I'd like to say to our Spanish speaking users:

A nuestros usuarios hispanohablantes: ¡Gracias! Gracias por su confianza durante estos años y, ¡bienvenidos a LinkedIn en español! Esperamos que esta transformación les ayude a formar nuevas relaciones profesionales de confianza y fortalecer las existentes.

A nuestros nuevos usuarios: ¡Bienvenidos a LinkedIn! Se han unido a más de 25 millones de profesionales de todo el mundo. Les invitamos a descubrir el potencial de sus redes y a participar y colaborar con sus contactos de confianza. ¿Cómo empezar? Es muy simple: Completen su perfil, amplíen su red y compartan información con sus contactos para generar nuevas oportunidades.   

At LinkedIn we are committed to providing professionals with tools to help them be more effective at what they do. Making our site available in Spanish is just another way to address the needs of professionals all over the world. After all, Spanish is spoken by some of the largest and fastest growing group of Internet users. Count this as the beginning of many more languages to come.

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Editor's Note: If you're in a hurry to check out the Spanish version of our site, just log into LinkedIn and access the "Language" drop down menu on the top right hand corner of the homepage header. 

We're glad to announce the launch of our strategic relationship with NYTimes.com that will allow readers to receive targeted news articles based on their unique attributes. In addition, they’ll also be able to share and discuss articles they read on NYTimes.com with other LinkedIn members in their network.

Below is a quick overview of the two features and how you can make use of them, both on LinkedIn and on the NYTimes.com site (NYT):

1. Receive targeted news headlines on NYT

With the LinkedIn-NYTimes.com relationship, members can now receive targeted headlines in every article of the Business & Technology sections (not the homepage) based upon that member’s profession and industry, providing users with the most relevant and valuable content for their profession.

LinkedIn will power a targeted headline feature on NYTimes.com’s Business and Technology pages that will highlight the five latest Times articles relevant to readers based on the non-personally identifiable attributes of their LinkedIn profile (see image below to the right of the article). 

For example, LinkedIn members who work in the energy sector will have the option to get relevant, targeted Times stories that cover the energy industry.

2. Share NYT articles on LinkedIn

The second feature we're announcing today enables you to share any article you read on NYT with your LinkedIn Company Network. This feature is incorporated into the "Share" tool on all article pages in the New York Times site.

Once you click on the Share icon, you’ll have the option to share that article either with your company network or select individuals in your LinkedIn network. 

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This is yet another way you can add value to your LinkedIn experience both on and off our site by leveraging the power of your professional network.

For more information on the announcement, please check out the New York Times' press release as well as our joint announcement on the NYTimes site. Feel free to leave your comments right here on the blog.

Last Thursday, Kevin Brown visited LinkedIn's Mountain View office to do a presentation on Shindig, an OpenSocial Reference Implementation. Below are my notes from his talk.

In September 2007, Google started thinking about Social APIs. Google Gadgets would be better with access to Social Data ... but that's just Google. It was recognized that this is something that many others would like access to. OpenSocial was announced in November 2007. It's an open standard for developer platforms that has a strong emphasis on "social" data. It's based on gadgets which is now covered by The Open Social Foundation.

In November, many Googlers started working on a Google Code project based on Java and iGoogle. However, there was too much proprietary code. In December, Brian McCallister of Ning created an ASF Proposal for Shindig. It was a rough port of iGoogle but with Ning's PHP code. This turned out to be a great starting point. It immediately got interest from Google, Hi5, MySpace and others. While most committers are still from Google, there are 12 developers that work on it full time and they're adding 2 committers each month. Shindig is a Java/PHP implementation of OpenSocial. Open Campfire is an Apache-licensed .NET implementation that hopes to eventually merge into Shindig.

Shindig has extensive use of existing open source components, including Abdera, Jakarta Commons, Guice, ICU4J, OAuth.net, and JSON.org. It's largely well tested (developers use TDD), especially for the newer code. There's a heavy emphasis on DI (Guice helps tremendously) and the builds are done with Maven (Apache recommendation, Kevin hates it).

3 Parts of Shindig:

1. Gadget Rendering: Fetches/parses gadget XML documents. It also provides a robust proxy to implement gadgets.io requirements (including OAuth and Signed Fetch). It acts as a "glue" between JavaScript libraries, remote sites and social data. It's built for medium to large deployments and has robust HTTP support. Lastly, it's very flexible so all major components can be replaced.
2. Social API: Handles RESTful API calls and interacts with social data. It provides a backend for opensocial.* JavaScript APIs. It's mostly a serialization/de-serialization layer that delegates to your social data. Currently evaluation two implementation options (Dave Primer's AtomPub version or JSON version - lengthy explanation on shindig-dev). Currently, developers are creating an entirely new version because of REST and its JSON support. REST has a lot of issues when it comes to JSON. It works great with AtomPub, but AtomPub has too much verbose XML.
3. Client Code: The first issue that comes up with client code is Security.

For security, iframes cover most of the problems. Cross-domain communication requires special effort - gadgets.rpc has to be implemented using a variety of techniques: window.postMessage in HTML5, document.frameElement in Firefox and window.opener in IE (still in development). Retrieving third-party data is covered by OAuth and Signed Fetch. Getting OAuth / Signed Fetch credentials can be done by passing an encrypted blog of data to the server and treating it as a cookie equivalent. Caja is the future.

Caja (pronounced ka-ha) makes it possible to run third-party JavaScript alongside existing code. It's not quite ready yet, but significant process has been made. It has limited support in Shindig today, which requires "taming" JavaScript APIs and DOM testing.

Summary
Full support for 0.6-0.8 gadget rendering specification (both versions). Full support for 0.6-0.8 JavaScript APIs. REST mostly done (both versions, PHP is closer). Deployed (or in progress) on many sites: Orkut, hi5, iGoogle sandbox, Hyves, CyWorld, Ning and hundreds of others. It has a very active mailing list and they're very interested in finding folks with more Maven experience to help out.

The project's next priority is a stable release. Shindig 1.0 will be OpenSocial 0.8 Compliant. It must have full support for REST. The Java and PHP implementations should be released around the same time. Priority #2 is graduating from Apache Incubator (goals are currently on target). One of the main things they need is more committers, especially those that aren't from Google. Priority #3 is future enhancements, including:

• 0.9: "proxied" content type
• 0.9: OpenSocial templates
• HTTP Performance Improvements
• "out of the box" shared caching
• More social data implementations (e.g. JDBC)
• Better Documentation

We have many more Tech Talks planned in the future at LinkedIn. Please stay tuned to this blog to learn about new and exciting technologies that we're learning about.

NOTE: This entry was published with Kevin Brown's permission.