LinkedIn announced the launch of a new platform today that some are likening to Facebook’s huge rollout of the open graph (which included integration and social plugins all over the web).

“With this release, we’re including a powerful set of plugins, to further help bring professional identity & insights into your application,” said LinkedIn Vice President, Product Managment, Adam Nash. “For example, you can show your visitors who they know in a professional context with the Member Profile plugin, and display rich personalized insights about companies featured on your site with the Company Insider plugin.”

There are seven new plugins:

• Sign In with LinkedIn, which makes it easier for users to authenticate or register for your site using their LinkedIn identity
• Share, a button which enables users to share your website with LinkedIn’s professional audience
• Member Profile, which brings LinkedIn profiles to your site
• Full Member Profile, which brings larger, more detailed LinkedIn profiles to your site
• Company Profile, which displays key company info at-a-glance
• Company Insider, which shows rich company data from several different views
• Recommend, a button which enables users to recommend your products and drive traffic back to you

You may recall about a week ago, when Google also launched its version of Facebook’s open/graph social plugins via the +1 button. This is somewhat different because it plays into search, but it is also part of Googles’ ongoing efforts to become more social. Besides, Facebook also looks at “like” data for its own search, and it may compete with Google more and more going forward.

Now we can probably look for LinkedIn data to become more valuable in a variety of ways (including search).