LinkedIn goes exponential

They're such an obvious Google acquisition target. Maybe too obvious.

I've been on LinkedIn for about a year, but for most of that time my network wasn't too large. I didn't really press it. More recently several things boosted my use and even led to some proselytizing:

• a high school reunion led to some sentimental additions
• I started attaching my LinkedIn profile to my email signature
• I decided I wanted a net presence (a facade or facet identity) that was less revealing than my old web site.
• I added a link to my LinkedIn profile to my corporate Sharepoint profile
• LinkedIn will now process a Gmail contact list and look for matches to LinkedIn members (among others I located a sister-in-law that way)
• organic growth
  

The result is my network is getting fairly large and it's growing very quickly:

19,053 new people in your network since November 1

People in your network are hiring:
* Sr Data Warehouse Architect at Yahoo! Inc.
* SAP HR and SD Consultants at Bluefin Resources
* SAP Business Analyst (various disciplines, levels, all perm/full time) at Goodrich Aerostructures

This is going to be interesting. The trick for LinkedIn will be to extract revenue without getting too greedy -- though their end point is most likely to be a Microsoft or Google acquistion.