Barry alerted me to this blog post, in which the author pines for RIM to purchase LinkedIn.
Social networking sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace have grown in popularity over the past couple of years. They provide a means for people to maintain contact and interact with those that they chose to as well as meet new people with common interests.
It’s fair to say that most of RIM’s Blackberry users are in the business sector, so LinkedIn makes more sense than Facebook or MySpace. Probably the best application of using LinkedIn would be as an external contact manager. Being able to call or email from a centrally managed contact list, like LinkedIn, could prove to be handy. Plaxo would be a candidate to partner with in these regards, too.
The real gotcha would likely come from IT departments who have implemented the Blackberry Enterprise Server to centrally manage and support their Blackberry users via integration with Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino or Novell GroupWise. External contacts coming in from LinkedIn could possibly give CIOs and CTOs many a sleepless night.
A deal with a social networking site like LinkedIn might make sense for RIM’s much smaller consumer market to up the “cool” factor of the Blackberry service with devices like the Curve and Pearl.
