IP Democracy: Has LinkedIn Reached a Tipping Point?

Like most people in the communications and tech sector, I joined business networking service LinkedIn a few years back, thinking it was possibly cool. But, after a few half-hearted attempts to beef up my connections, I forgot about the service, with the exception of another half-hearted attempt about a year ago (spurred by an email I received from LinkedIn) to once again make more connections.

But lately I’ve been getting more and more requests for connections and LinkedIn now seems, somehow, more alive than it has been. As it turns out, LinkedIn is gaining steam and may in fact be at a tipping point according to this long profile of the networking service by Business 2.0’s Michael Copeland.

Copeland calls it the MySpace for grown-ups, but LinkedIn is all about business and there’s little socializing going on. Membership has doubled over the past year and rumors are afoot that Yahoo! is looking to buy LinkedIn, which is backed by A-list venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Greylock.

(Note: I just went to check out LinkedIn and blew a precious hour sending out invites to contacts I discovered are also on LinkedIn. Perhaps LinkedIn, if not a truly social networking site, is nevertheless becoming as addictive as MySpace or, more currently, Facebook…)

But it’s the membership boom that is making LinkedIn suddently hot, and the recent wave of high-tech start-ups has helped propel growth.

How did LinkedIn go from lame to, well, linked in? Web 2.0 came along, for one thing. A new wave of dotcom startups drew more entrepreneurs and investors to the service, which already boasted Silicon Valley’s A-list. As the network grew, more people began noticing the quality of the links and realized that real deals were getting done.

Co-founded by PayPal veteran Reid Hoffman, who currently runs LinkedIn, the service just feels to me like it has momentum and sure enough it does. More than that, it sounds as if LinkedIn is become a mandatory business nicety.

“For many, it’s become irresponsible to not invite business associates into your LinkedIn network,” says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in sociology and strategy. “When that kind of cultural inflection point occurs, which is what LinkedIn is going through now, that is when things really begin to take off.”

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on December 4, 2006 10:37 PM to IP Democracy