Opener Than Thou

What's interesting about the news that LinkedIn is going to "open up" is that it is happening as a direct result of competitive pressure:

He told me that over next 9 months LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers, ostensibly to make it more of platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LlinkedIn notifications.

In other words, once somebody in a space starts opening up, its competitors simply have no choice but to follow if they want to keep the developers with them - absent unnatural constraints like lock-ins born of long-standing monopolistic behaviour....