Viadeo, the business social network with 35 million members worldwide, is releasing its public API to boost usability and increase functionality for its members.  With Viadeo’s open API, third party developers can leverage the company’s business social networking platform to create a personalized web experience for their site visitors which will ultimately increase brand awareness, eventually driving revenue and elevating engagement.  The move is particularly important for Viadeo’s global expansion, as it looks to gain traction in the US, competing with the rather established LinkedIn platform.

“Viadeo is a network for doing business, and not just about finding your next job.  We offer a compelling tool for entrepreneurs who are building businesses with suppliers, customers and employees in emerging markets like China,” said Dan Serfaty, CEO, Viadeo.

“Now with our open API, third party developers can bring a professional social context to websites, applications and services via our globally-focused social graph.”

By tapping into Viadeo’s social graph, third party developers can create more compelling applications that will open up new markets and deliver enhanced business capabilities.  Some examples of applications that can be socially enhanced are collaborative workspace tools, CRMs, email clients and social aggregators.  A detailed list of technology providers and the Viadeo Graph API can be found on the Viadeo developer site.

Viadeo Dev Challenge

To get the party started, Viadeo also announced the Viadeo Dev Challenge which will run from September 7 until October 14, 2011.  The goal of the challenge is to encourage developers to create a killer app that leverages the Viadeo API.   Submissions will be reviewed from October 17-21 and the winners will be selected by an esteemed panel of judges including Robert Scoble and Kin Lane of Programmable Web.  There’s a $10k prize at stake for the grand winner, which is the same amount as another developer challenge kicking off today by Appcelerator.

A global profession

With representatives on all five continents, the Viadeo Group offers network development solutions and business opportunities at both local and global levels to over 35 million professional people. Based in Paris, the company has offices in the US and the UK, as well as several other cities around the world.  With a few different names, Viadeo looks to embed itself in the professional culture wherever it’s building a base.  The result is a study in user data to determine the best features, products and services to offer, and its newly launched API, which has been around a few months longer in Europe, will also contribute towards.

It’s not just the data Viadeo collects, but the data it provides that gives its platform strength.  As big data analysis lends itself to new market research and social enterprise capabilities, platforms like Viadeo will be leveraged for their data sets.  “I think the latest movement I see is tapping into market sentiment and social media becoming an extreme feeder of that,” Serfaty says.  “That’s an area where social media and the leveraging of that data is evolving very rapidly, with all the benefits and dangers of how this data could be used.”

“Where we fit in–we’re one of the providers of such data, given a user provides permission.  We don’t see ourselves as different from LinkedIn or Facebook–there’s quite a bit of sentiment in our data sets that we already leverage, and what the European market needs isn’t the same as what we see in Latin America or the U.S.”

Contributors: Mellisa Tolentino