Every social network launched in the last three years has added games, walls, photo tagging, or some version of a news feed showing what your connections are doing in real time. LinkedIn has added almost none of that, and it is one of the only networks in this entire category that is actually making money.
I do not think those two facts are unrelated.
The site does one thing. You build a profile that looks like a resume, you connect to people you have actually worked with, and occasionally somebody asks for or gives a written recommendation. There is no feed of what your connections had for lunch, no application platform, no games. Log in, and there is very little to do beyond the reason you came: updating your own profile or looking at somebody else’s.
That sounds like a limitation, and I think it is closer to the entire strategy.
A network built for professional context has a different failure mode than one built for entertainment. Nobody minds that Facebook is a way to waste twenty minutes, because wasting twenty minutes was roughly the point. A professional network that became a way to waste twenty minutes would defeat its purpose, because it is useful only because the people on it can trust the context. Your employer, your former colleagues, and a recruiter evaluating you are all looking at the same profile, and a certain seriousness is what keeps that arrangement functioning.
Which is also, I suspect, why it turns a profit while nearly everything comparable in scale is burning venture money waiting for an advertising model to arrive. A company can charge recruiters directly for the ability to search a database of people who described their own experience honestly because they were talking to future employers, not friends. That is a business model with a customer willing to pay today, not eventually, and it requires no viral mechanic or third-party platform to get there.
The obvious risk is that boring does not grow the way entertaining does. Nobody logs into this out of habit the way people check a feed, and the site lives or dies on people having an actual professional reason to be there in a given week. But I would rather own a smaller network people trust with their careers than a larger one people trust with their weekend, and on that measure LinkedIn is quietly ahead of nearly everyone building something louder.