Remember the good old days. Those days when after graduating from high school you could pretty much forget about all your classmates, as within two weeks of finishing school we were scattered to the four winds?  Your buddies in the army, whom you forgot about within a week of transferring to a new assignment?  Frat or sorority friends whom you have not contacted in the past 20 years?

Social networking sites have started changing all the rules of how we interact with others.  Sites ranging from classmates.com to MySpace are bringing not only entirely new communities together, but also bringing us back in touch with those whom we spent quality time with in prior phases of our lives.

Professionally, there also social networking sites that have stood out among their peers - Facebook and LinkedIN.  What makes both of these sites unique is the number of members.  For example, LinkedIN claims over 35 million users representing more than 200 countries, with executive membership from all Fortune 500 companies.  That is a lot of people. 

LinkedIN's philosophy is pretty simple:

Relationships Matter

Your professional network of trusted contacts gives you an advantage in your career, and is one of your most valuable assets. LinkedIn exists to help you make better use of your professional network and help the people you trust in return.

Our mission is to connect the world's professionals to accelerate their success. We believe that in a global connected economy, your success as a professional and your competitiveness as a company depends upon faster access to insight and resources you can trust.

As with all social networking sites, members can search for personal and professional contacts using a fairly powerful search engine, tagging company names, schools, geographies, and interests to bring together members.  Once you have added a member to your contact list or community, then your contact information for that person will always be as current as the member's diligence in keeping their profile up to date.

Professional groups, such as the CTC's LinkedIN group, allow even further expansion of a social network to include other people with similar interests - giving you the ability to rapidly meet others who share your common professional or personal interests.

The Law of Plentitude

 The law of plentitude is a pretty interesting concept.  It says that whenever a new community, product, or concept is launched, there is a risk to first members of that community of either wasting time or money - or at a worst case creating an "opportunity cost" of losing time or resources that could be better used in another established activity.

This is true up to around 15~20% community adoption in the new community, product, or concept.  Once a certain percentage of a given community or market has adopted that concept, a shift begins that says you are at more risk of not joining the new community, or adopting use of a new product.  This was true back in the day of fax, the adoption of email, and many other technology shifts (like from the horse to the motor car...).

So a social networking site like LinkedIN may seem like a cute thing that geeks do, but when you start looking at the numbers, and start understanding that LinkedIN may actually have become a defacto location where you can find people, and people can find you, then at 35 million people you have to at least take the time to consider taking the community seriously.

In our own case, the CTC group on LinkedIN (as of 2 Feb 2009) has 1165 members.  With a blog entry or group message you now have the ability to connect with potentially 1165 people you have never met, but share a common business or industry interest with you.  That is powerful.  Those who do not connect with LinkedIN would never even know that community exists.

Whether you think the idea of social networking sites such as LinkedIN is good or not, given the dynamics of the Law of Plentitude, you owe it to yourself to at least take the time to check it out, and determine if this is a necessity for your personal, professional, or company's future.

You can check out my LinkedIN profile at:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnsavageau