To see what they said (and what all the other social networks said) about their Open Social implementations you can watch the full “Meet the Containers” session from Google I/O.

But that is the future, there are a couple “widgets” that already exist for Linkedin, they aren’t Open Social but we can see how they will handle widgets from what is already there. The widgets page, the “about applications” page, and the “authorized applications” page (you must be logged in to see the “authorized applications” page)

Let’s look at a widget created by BusinessWeek for Linkedin that displays how many connections you have to a company, let’s look at Google:


The widget displays the amount of people you are linked to in Google if you are signed in, if you aren’t signed in it will show you how many people work at the company and prompt you to sign in.
When I am signed into Linkedin it displays this for me (image below).

This widget is quite useful for your readers because it allows them to see who they are connected to at that company.

I think it would also be a great widget for company blogs. If you run a company blog, this could be in your sidebar and would encourage interaction with your company.

BusinessWeek uses this gadget, but use the “popup” version. Here is used in a story about HP…

If you click on “linkedin connections” you get…

So if I read the story, and I needed to respond to it, or if it reminded me that I needed to contact someone at HP, I could immediately do so without having to look that contact up.

How to install the Linkedin widget

The instructions for installing the different versions of this widget are here, but it might be confusing if you want it to display in a blog sidebar because part of those instructions tell you to put something in the “head” section of your page. To do this in WordPress, just go to the “Presentation” tab and then choose “theme editor”

once you are in the theme editor, look to the right and choose “header”…

After you choose header you can add the provided code into the head section, save, and then put the rest of the code in your post using the “code” tab.

Remember that the “span” value has to match the first value of the code and the company name is the second value…

To choose a different company, just change the second value (the first value is the “span” id).