Linkedin is now eerily similar to Facebook (which I shun) with work anniversaries, timelines, "You may know" and "you may be interested in" lists and all this other nonsense. It's nothing more than a trolling site for headhunters and large corps to pick off low-hanging fruit.
No big loss.
Anyway, the future of professional social networks is destined to be rich ones for each profession/vertical, not the "crappy/high noise for everyone" linkedin model.
I know I'm focusing more on crunchbase[0] and angellist[1] APIs for my startup.
However, at this point crunchbase is pretty open (to the point of giving data dumps) so I'll give them the benefit of doubt for the next 2 years.
Anyway, startups seem to tend towards closing off access to their data as they become the dominant player so it's a question of when not whether.
However, this is great news :) It will just make linkedin irrelevant quicker. They are moving away from being a social network for professionals to being a source of sales intelligence. Most users wont be too happy with that. And, unlike facebook, linkedin is much easier to migrate off of. Really, linkedin was the first big professional network, not the last one.
IMHO angellist is more in line with what the future of professional networks is.
I believe there are web scraping companies that sell monthly dumps of LinkedIn data, but I don't know off-hand how much something like that would cost.
It would also likely depend on whether you wanted US-only data or worldwide.
To further illustrate this point, LinkedIn provides a helpful directory at the bottom of their homepage, allowing one to browse every user[0] and every company[1] in their graph. Hard pressed to argue that it's illegal to navigate to every single profile if you serve a directory of them.
Also, I believe there are companies[2] and shops[3] that specialize in doing that kind of thing. I would say it would be worth reaching out to them, if nothing else just to get a sense for what something like that would cost.
0 = https://www.linkedin.com/directory/people-1-5-1/ 1 = https://www.linkedin.com/directory/companies 2 = http://scrapinghub.com/ (makers of the outstanding Scrapy framework!) 3 = http://webscrapinghelp.com
Selling it is a different matter, and one that I don't have enough law background to answer. It may fall under the provision in US copyright law that says that facts are not copyrightable. So long as you are just selling the facts of the graph that they gladly serve to the Internet, ... again, I am not experienced enough to comment.
They're basically restricting access to 90% of their API.
They just rehashed the website @ developer.linkedin.com
