It made me smile that she's pegged me as a 'business enthusiast', but she had reminded me about the very first online social network I'd joined back in 2006. Back then I'd joined up and quickly linked up to a handful of my professional associates from around the world. At the time I wrote in Strive Notes, 'I quickly established 12 connections that plugs me into a network of 103 people (friends of friends). Taken a step further, I've got more than 38,000 new connections (friends of friends' friends). The next thing for me to do is learn how to use this tool to make the most of these connections.'

Well I never did discover the real value and quickly forgot about it altogether. That is until last week when I was prompted. I spent some time revisiting LinkedIn over the weekend and was delighted with what I found. Not only had the site's social features drastically improved, its community is reaching a critical mass that makes it a viable alternative to Facebook for us 'business enthusiasts'.

LinkedIn, now five years old, could be perceived as the old man of social networks. It emerged in the pre-web 2.0 scene and has grown into a community that is 22,000,000 strong.

When you join you create a profile based on your professional qualifications and experience and a network consisting of your business connections, your connections' connections, and the people they know.

The idea is that once you've established your network you can find potential clients, service providers, subject experts, and potential partners who come recommended. Also people can find you creating business opportunities, job prospects or find a pool of qualified, recommended candidates.

LinkedIn is free to join but premium accounts are on offer if you want access to a wider range of tools for finding and reaching the right people, whether or not they are in your network.

So having spent some time on LinkedIn this weekend, I've grown my contact to 61 connections, which plugs me into a network of 3,600 professionals and taken the next step (friend of friends) to 408,000. Yet, I still need to work out how to work these connections to benefit my business.

But plenty of people do see the value; the company reports having made a healthy US $100 million in revenue this year.

News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch's media empire and owner of Fox, Sky, News of the World, The Wall Street Journal and yes, MySpace, had been rumoured to be interested in buying LinkedIn, but the company has so far spurned these advances in favour of raising a new round of funding.

It's being shopped to venture capitalist right now and is rumoured to have a valuation of US $ 1 billion!

In light of the credit crunch and the possibility of a global recession, it remains to be seen what the true valuation will be. But it seems to me that because the platform is mature and its business user profile, the folks at LinkedIn have the opportunity to do something quite different from Facebook and MySpace.

It wouldn't take a whole leap of logic to reposition LinkedIn in the same category as Salesforce.com. Combining the social network and SaaS aspects of the site, would give it a unique proposition for the enterprise.

By introducing a few new software features, a project management component, scheduling, location based services, for example, LinkedIn could easily be marketed almost as a white boxed intranet platform that is robust, feature rich and easy to use.

About a year ago I wrote about an Isle of Man company, Workconnexions.com, which was doing some interesting things in a similar vein to LinkedIn. Their site has undergone a much needed radical revamp in the past few months, making it much more user-friendly. But one year on, the site has so far failed to gain the user base necessary to make it a viable local alternative as a social network. White boxing for the enterprise could be an alternative strategy, but if LinkedIn moved into this space, it would lay waste many a start up including ones like WorkConnexions.


>>Sherrilynne Starkie is the managing partner of Strive Public Relations, a strategic communications consultancy serving the Isle of Man. She provides her views on business and technology each week in Tech Talk. Visit her business blog, Strive Notes for frequent updates
www.strivepr.com or follow her on twitter.com/sherrilynne.