[lifeisstillgood]

All I can think of is walled gardens need upkeep

LinkedIn is the most amazing business node graph out there - for a professional person online it has everybody and uptodate. But there is a wafer thin business model if they played their hand brilliantly - and they play it like a drunk Captain Hook trying second dealing in Vegas.

I just hope that when / if it all collapses we can club together and transfer out the edge connections.

[Apocryphon]

Don't they have a more cohesive and profitable business model than Facebook?

[veemjeem]

Even Facebook has a better model as their P/E ratio is only 200 or so.

[xxpor]

Saying the value of a biz model is inversely proportional to P/E is ridiculous.

[lifeisstillgood]

Surely not - P/E ratio is a guess at future profits factored in now. If a company is demonstrating real profits now and so has a viable business model, it will be easier to guess (project?) future profit and so P/E ratio will lower

I suspect this only works for P/E ratios above one order of magnitude - when dealing with companies that obey laws of gravity other factors come in to play (I mean seriously 900x earnings. That's insane).

[xxpor]

So you're agreeing with me. I'm arguing it has minimal correlation. If high P/E = future profits, the model is useful. Low P/E (if they are making a healthy profit) = the model is useful.

It's the edge case of low P/E and low profits that indicates a non-valuable biz model.

[xutopia]

Can you explain what you mean? It's not obvious to me from my perspective.

[dredmorbius]

If you build a closed ecosystem, you and you alone are responsible for its value. As with other forms of leverage, you win on the upside, but there's also a lot to lose going down. LinkedIn is a closed, walled garden. It's gotten increasingly obnoxious (enough so that I've pared my legitimate profile down to its bare bones, and have a spoof one I use for research). And, well, we've seen any number of walled gardens implode spectacularly.

Logged into MySpace recently?

[unono]

Could linkedin use it's data for nefarious purposes? Yes.

Could some professionals ask to be compensated for being on the network? Yes.

Have the professionals on linkedin realized the above? No.

[lifeisstillgood]

Many professionals are compensated for being on LinkedIn - just not by LinkedIn direct !

Oh and I consider the spam I have to wade through to use it a nefarious purpose :-)