Not surprisingly and in a very smart move, LinkedIn has expanded its platform to allow professionals to add specific applications to their profile. On the surface, this appears to be just a copy of the Facebook Application Platform strategy, but in reality its quite different. And it marks LinkedIn’s most major assault on the traditional intranet.

So first some facts about LinkedIn Apps. It launched with 10 applications from 8 big time developers. LinkedIn users (and there are 30 million of them) can now add SlideShare and Google presentations,  Amazon reading lists, Huddle Workspaces, Wordpress blog posts and Box.net applications among others. If you look at the list carefully, you’ll notice that many of these applications when stitched together form the core of an enterprise intranet. Especially when you add the fact that LinkedIn itself is a living people finder that’s more complete than anything behind the firewall. 

Why does this matter? It’s not going do very much for the largest of enterprises. They still need their secure intranets, with their dashboards and business applications. But for everyone else, this becomes a much easier way to collaborate and share information especially among small and medium sized businesses. Given that the smaller you are, the more you need to collaborate with people outside your company, LinkedIn Apps provides the perfect platform. Everybody already has a username and password and are familiar with the interface.

I’m willing to bet that within the next year if LinkedIn Apps plays its cards right, players like Zoho, Basecamp, Intranet Dashboard, WebExOffice and Intranets.com will find themselves losing customers. Now, the current version of LinkedIn Apps is quite light and unlike Facebook which allowed anyone to build an application on the platform, LinkedIn has been very selective in who they partner with. In its current incarnation, LinkedIn Apps can’t compete with any of those other hosted intranet solutions. But that can change quickly. And when it does, those competitors will be in trouble especially because everyone is already using LinkedIn for some purpose or the other and it allows its users to collaborate with people outside the firewall too. 

In a nutshell, this is a great move by LinkedIn and with their cautious approach similar to Apple’s first iPhone launch with its limited applications, they’re being sensible and strategic in how they play in this space. Now lets see how many of the 30 million LinkedIn users adopt these applications or should I say “Intranet in a Profile” offerings?