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LinkedIn was the best widely available networking tool we had, at one time. But of course, DOS was the best widely available PC operating system we had at one time, too. Also let's clarify that we are talking *social* networking here not physical LAN type networking. Just for the people who got into the room late.

LinkedIn has two things that prevented it becoming a social networking tool of useful proportions. One, the contortions you have to go through in order to add people to your network are truly convoluted. See, to me social networking is all about meeting new people and being easily able to add them to my list of friends. It's not about taking your existing friends and moving the list to some new service, and then being stuck with the same list. It's not about having to track down email addresses and details and stuff to "prove" that you know the person. Sheesh if that were what social networking was all about we'd all be born live and die within the same four walls and never meet another person! Come on social networks, catch up!

The second thing that prevents LinkedIn being "the" social networking application is that, beyond being a glorified address book for people you already know, it has - nothing. No places where you can share common interests unless you build your own discussion forum somewhere else and invite the people in your address book to, and hope they can be bothered enough to register with yet another online application. Crap guys, I have my email address book on my PC for that!

The third thing (okay so I fibbed a bit about the num ber of things wrong with LinkedIn) is that more savvy social networking applications are rising above the event horizon - what MySpace started, now applications like Facebook and Ning and even the New Plaxo are continuing, and doing so far better than LinkedIn.

So - LinkedIn was a pioneering application and one of the first tools we had for scraping one another's address books - but it won't be the last and it certainly isn't the best any more.

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