The social networking site for professionals, LinkedIn, has launched a developer platform and a redesign of the site.

Supporting Google’s OpenSocial platform, the new "Intelligent Application" platform will open up the site to third party "business productivity applications" and will let developers add LinkedIn features to their own websites.

User's profile pages can now be customised, a welcome change for an audience used to this kind of functionality with other networking sites like Facebook, and modules can be added or removed.

The redesign has also introduced simplified navigation, with five buttons at the top of the homepage instead of the previous ten.

LinkedIn boasts around 17 million registered users, and recently hit the one million member milestone in the UK.

>> Via - e-consultancy