LinkedIn

LinkedIn has crossed some magical threshold in terms of its user activity. If you take a look at their Alexa activity, traffic has literally jumped several-hundred fold since April. Over the past year the company has introduced some high-value services that seem to be catching fire (a Plaxo-type service that integrates to Outlook and updates contacts, People Search for jobs and a Reconnect service to job/class peers), all leveraging its growing community of 5MM+ business users. Personally I find myself going back to the well a lot these days, looking for people that I've lost touch with.

There's still a few gaffes in the service. When trying to find my 'analyst class' at Bain & Co, there wasn't an easy way to section off the years worked at the company. It looks like LinkedIn is pushing their old classmates reconnect service more aggressively (this service does look at years attended). That said, LinkedIn (Alexa rank 211) has finally turned into a successful business user community and taken the top spot from the likes of Ryze (1,924) Plaxo (3,394) and Spoke (100,505). More good news for Sequoia and Greylock, LinkedIn's investors. Lucky bastards :)