LinkedIn Goes 2.0

LinkedIn will start allowing user-created applications as part of an effort to keep up with social networking competitors like Facebook and MySpace, PC World reports. The professional networking site said today it has redesigned its home page and plans to display relevant BusinessWeek stories on users' profiles, as well as highlighting stories their colleagues are reading.

"When we look forward to 2008, we see people and professionals more and more going beyond the connections and actually using LinkedIn to make themselves more productive on a daily basis," a rep said. The company said it would support the application programming interfaces for Google's OpenSocial development platform. Facebook also recently decided to let developers create applications for its site. (More social networking stories.)