Thursday, May 15, 2014

Hoping for LinkedIn Vetted API access

Just submitted a request for Vetted API access [source] on LinkedIn to do a little research project on transition probabilities. Signing up as a developer [source] only gives you access to company search and your profile and basic information from 1st degree connections.

I understand the reasons, both noble (e.g. protecting user privacy) and ignoble (e.g. enforcing a closed ecosystem, like they did with CRM, which is quite frankly evil [source]). Will just say it's more hassle than I was expecting for a simple research project.

Basically, I want to identify: 
  • People like me (starting from me)
  • Where they came from.
  • Infer where they are likely to go.
  • The co-variables that are strongly correlated (positive or negative) to particular transitions and joint-transitions.
Here's hoping that LinkedIn will provide access for my little research project. There isn't much I can do with basic profile information from 1st degree connections; need the entire network (~200k people) and non-basic profile information such as companies/universities attended to really get going.

The previous post on Tessella [source], is a very basic example of what I want to do (on a much larger scale of course) if I get vetted.

Will be using LinkedIn Python API [source]. As an aside, the code itself is beautiful. 

1 comment:

Colin Eberhardt said...

So ... did you get access? I am thinking of applying.