I’m not a fan of LinkedIn.  I’m on there, of course. I keep my account fairly updated.  I respect the profitability and valuation.  I just happen to think it has a timeline built in that the founders may have not considered.

LinkedIn is social networking for people who are afraid of social networking.  To be more accurate, it’s social networking for people who are convinced it’s possible, and beneficial, to create a hard separation between who a person is as a business entity, and who a person is as a social entity.

This was possible, a decade ago.  It’s arguably possible now, for people who aren’t truly connected, or people who are intensely careful.  It won’t be true in 5 years.  And, I think, those five years will make LinkedIn irrelevant.

Facebook is about people and lives.  The social graph they offer, even if it is become ever murkier, incorporates all aspects of a person.  As a tool for getting to know people, or providing background information, this is useful.  You can see who someone is in a wider arena then their resume - and let’s be honest, LinkedIn is a place where people, even in a social conversational context, attempt to animate their resume as a character.

Comparatively, LinkedIn isn’t about people or lives.  It’s about qualifications and professional experience, which even as a hiring tool, seems hollow to me.  I’m not sure what LinkedIn adds to the process that isn’t better achieved by interacting with the same person in a network that is actively social.

I don’t see a future in a non-social social network.  LinkedIn is a place where one can seem connected while hiding from the central reality of social media - that your life, all of it, is something you will need to own and take responsibility for.  A record will likely exist.  A record that you do not control.

As a professional tool, you’ll learn more from a resume and a few phone calls than you will from perusing the LinkedIn account of a potential hire or collaborator.  However, looking at someone’s twitter account, facebook, and website, would be give information about the human being that, if you look at it with the correct perspective, helps you find out it this is a person you could work with.

LinkedIn is going to be obsolete in 5 years.  [Edit: I’ve reconsidered the following sentence.] It could be useful as a Facebook application right now.

That said, there will always be money is creating a version of something gamechanging that doesn’t intimidate the older generation in the workforce.  And yes, that is how I think of LinkedIn: the social network that won’t make my father uncomfortable.