I wrote earlier about how LinkedIn provides profile-based targeting of Google AdWords on their site. Today I learned that for over six months, they've been experimenting with New York Times on targeting content on nytimes.com based on the common visitors' LinkedIn profiles. I hadn't noticed this because NYTimes doesn't belong to my regular news sources; it probably should, as they've certainly been innovating on making news more relevant in this day and age, and I applaud them for that effort.
Anyway, had a brief look at how this is implemented as well. It's a fairly interesting JavaScript widget pulling in RSS feeds from different NY Times sections, though for now I didn't catch at what point did nytimes.com ask linkedin.com for the industry segment for me. Never mind though; such a cross-site request over AJAX would be pretty trivial to implement.
This of course resembles what Facebook Beacon was supposed to do, has some similarities also to Facebook Connect, and, I would assume, where MySpaceID and Google Friend Connect might also evolve as time passes. It certainly is a sign of things to come, where the siloing of data between different services starts to break down and information leak between them more and more, intentionally as well as by accident. There are all kinds of interesting business opportunities, privacy issues as well as enhanced user experience possibilities such partnerships will uncover. Will have to think about this further.
