Is underdog LinkedIn poised to beat flashy Facebook?

This is true, FB's volume potential is higher than LI. But it is also true that those people who are interested in their "business social network" are accustomed to paying for services that create business value, sometimes paying handsomely. Those people interested in their social network are less accustomed to paying for "social services", and may be less able to put a value on the service (telecommunication services excepted).

Agreed, but you're less likely to find falsified information on a LinkedIn page. The people on LinkedIn in are more likely to be real. That has considerably more tangible value IMO.

It's more than a glorified rolodex, really. With LinkedIn you get much more of a "push" approach to business networking, whereas the rolodex and telephone model is much more "pull" based.

I can examine the profile of someone I've worked with before and know before I contact them if they know someone with whom I'd be interested in connecting. I can get notification that they are changing jobs, looking for work, or trying to find someone with a specialization, and they can notify other people at the same time. The rolodex and telephone model make this much harder, and so normally suchnotification happens far later, when you call to otherwise just keep in touch, unless the matter is otherwise extremely urgent.

It also serves as nice electronic substitute for resume and references. There's nothing for you to lose, and it allows you to update both in real time, avoiding the need to submit a new resume and list of references to potential employers whenever you want to add something new.

I know that at the last couple of places I've worked, part of the recruitment process was looking over my LinkedIn profile -- around the time I was being considered, I got notification that someone from the place I was applying had viewed my profile. I don't know whether it helped in my case, but I can't imagine they would even bother if it was always a waste of time.

Virtual business cards / online rolodex. When you're running a company your business contacts are super important. So every time that I get a business card in some context I look the people up on LinkedIn, then I can also see more about their background, and I don't have to worry about losing their card or adding them to my address book.

Incidentally, I didn't get LinkedIn before starting a business either. I'd even canceled my original account because I found the deluge of people that I saw at work every day adding me as a contact rather silly. Now, though, I use LinkedIn (or its European competitor, Xing) several times a week.

I have a LI account, but I don't use it effectively, so I can't speak from personal experience (which speaks to your point)

But I do believe businesses like Angstro could build a valuable business off LI (they could build it off FB too, but the value is much less obvious). This is, of course, an in theory statement, not an in practice one. Presumably LI could add Angstro like features themselves?

http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?pr... (I have no affiliation with Angstro)

I've picked up a couple of consulting gigs through providing decent answers im the Answers section.

If I have a few moments spare at the end of the day, I'll look through open questions and answer them. Sometimes they are interesting questions that I would like to think through myself; sometimes they land directly in my area of expertise. But it's a win-win you help someone, and at the same time advertise that you are a reasonable, helpful guy who knows at least something about an area.

By comparison, I find Facebook completely pointless.

I've used it to look up customers, and people who work at various ISPs I was dealing with. I've also used it for the post-conference lookup to solidify connections that were made in person.

It's main utility to most people comes in the job hunting phase, but I've found it useful for building and maintaining weak ties with lots of people.

I'm always looking to grow my network, my public profile is at http://www.linkedin.com/in/laprice

Both in job hunting and filling positions. It goes both ways. Rather than trying to capture everything social it has focused on just capturing the career network and doing it well. If I'm on LinkedIn it's for a reason: Jobs.

If I'm on Facebook it could be any number of reasons all of which probing raises privacy concerns.

I used it to find out that I knew someone that knew a CEO-type at a potential acquirer. That was cool.

Facebook makes money. They seem to have roughly the attitude that Google did around 2000. I.e. they're making some money, could make more if that was their main focus, but their main focus in the short term is to evolve the site.

Not to say that FB is going to be as big as Google. Outliers on that scale may only appear every couple decades. But they have a similar hackerly vibe.

Let's do an interesting exercise. Facebook has 100 million users. Let's suppose 10% of that user base would be willing to pay a $1.99 to have a premium account (like unlimited number of photo albuns, customizable look&feel etc). That would mean almost $20m dollars monthly revenue, much much larger than their burn-rate. College students don't pay for SMS? Why some of them wouldn't then pay this small amount to Facebook? Sure, this is a very rough estimation based on old subscription-based business model. A product in a free market operates much differently than if you charge US$ $.01. But it only shows that Facebook has many ways to become successfully profitable. They are only being cautious.