Team Zuckerberg has received another shot across the bow at its ubiquitous “Like” button.

LinkedIn, the social media heavy-hitter geared toward professionals that recently hit 100 million profiles, has announced a number of improvements to its development platform. Most notably, I draw your attention to the “inShare” button, which grants users the ability to share affinities and finds with their LinkedIn connections, as well as an improved authorization function that allows users to log in to sites using their LinkedIn identity and profile.

This announcement comes on the heels of Google announcing that it would be implementing a similarly social “+1” button to its search and advertising offerings.

You can expect to see “inShare” in line with “Tweet this,” “Digg This,” or “Share on Facebook” all across the web in the near future.

LinkedIn also has a few other interesting offerings that may be coming soon to a website near you, including a plugin gallery that gives opportunities for bloggers and companies to give a professional context to their site with easy-to-implement coding that draws from information from LinkedIn, whether it be a company or personal profile or even the viewer’s connections to the people affiliated with the site or company.

All of this is a homerun from LinkedIn. You have to believe people who are serious about their business, their careers, their personal brands and professional online presence will be taking advantage of this added functionality as often as possible.  It will also lead to an increase in the number of people who make a choice each time they fire up their web browser: Am I surfing as personal/ Facebook me, or is this professional/LinkedIn me? And for those people who don’t make that choice, they just might have a reason to do so.

What do you think? Do you have room in your heart for another social sharing button? Are you a fan of keeping work & play separate on the Internet? Do you think you will spend more time on LinkedIN and less time on Facebook on account of this development?

- Thomas (@thomasmcdonald)