correlate

You see MySpace, Facebook and Friendster get a lot of the social networking press, but I still think that LinkedIn is one of the more valuable sites leveraging social networking principles. Now granted, I am no longer in college or do not use social networking to keep in contact with friends so my view on the space may be somewhat slanted to where I get personal value.

A blog I follow quite a lot, Read/WriteWeb, had a fantastic post on the topic some time ago, The Social Networking Faceoff. I believed then and still believe that page views is not the most accurate indicator of user value when it comes to social networking sites. That does not mean it is not a solid indicator on how well the site can monetize itself. My comments on their post back in September is still my opinion today:

…LinkedIn serves the business professional extremely well. I use it much more effectively as a networking and reference tool and use it in a much different manner than one can use the other networking sites you outline in the post.

Think LinkedIn is here to stay. Will it have stratospheric revenues due to “eyeball” test, probably not. But for overall long-term value it provides users, it will be interesting to see who competes… Just my thoughts…

Since then LinkedIn has gone through some changes at the top. Konstantin Guericke left to launch and be CEO of jaxtr. Reid Hoffman, the founding CEO, has hired a replacement in Dan Nye and is set to focus more of product and business strategy, and the company raised about $13 million in financing back in January. It will be interesting to see how this translates for future LinkedIn growth. I still contend that it is one of most valuable social networking sites on the web and has a fantastic audience demographic of mostly business professionals. We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds…