LinkedIn is by far the largest professional social network in the world. Indeed, LinkedIn now has about three times more citizens than Holland - which may explain why the Dutch have the highest international rate of adoption, per capita outside America, at 30%.
Meanwhile, India is the fastest growing LinkedIn nation, with nearly 3 million Indians now acknowledging that online relationships do indeed matter. See linkedin.com.
So why is LinkedIn getting a new member every second? Why do relationships matter?
It's what the American futurist Daniel Pink has described, in his 2002 bestseller, as the emergence of a free agent nation. The reality of today's economy is that, for better or worse, more and more of us are free agents, selling our individual services on the open market. The future, Pink argues, is "working for yourself."
And that, of course, is exactly the purpose of LinkedIn. It's a business tool for a free agent world - from Holland to India - where the individual is replacing the organisation as the central reality of commercial life.
The very rich, the very poor and the handful of lifers left in multinational organisations probably don't need to bother with LinkedIn. But the rest of us in the global creative economy need to pay attention. 50 million people can't be wrong. Relationships matter more than anything in the networked world.
New kids on the networking block
The problem with building a professional network online is that a contact list can be full of people you have never met and are unlikely to meet. So professional network app developers are trying to get the sector thinking in terms of fun and dating - instead of a formal process of sifting through names and job titles, next-generation apps are more about the moment and who wants to meet for coffee.
Shapr
Swiping right to signal approval is already deployed by business networking app Shapr. Paris-based cofounder, Thomas Bouttefort, says the idea was to get away from building long lists of distant contacts. Instead the app, rather like a dating service, suggests profiles that someone may want to swipe right on. It is powered by an algorithm that learns what each member is looking for in a business contact so it can make personalised matches. See shapr.com.
Grip
If you've ever tried to find someone at a conference but not quite managed to hook up, you will understand the rationale behind Grip. Constantly scouring event halls for the contacts he was hoping to make, co-founder Tim Groot realised everyone else was doing exactly the same thing and that connecting people at events would make a compelling business case for a new app. When he met Brent Hoberman, cofounder of Lastminute.com, at a tech conference in Helsinki, the pair found they had both been developing the same idea. The result was the launch of Grip (implying a hand shake) at the start of last year with Hoberman as chairman. Since then, 20,000 people have used the free service. See https://grip.events/.
BeBee
If all this swiping to meet contacts sounds too work-centric, Juan Imaz might have the service for you. The Madrid-based founder of BeBee believes too many people are thinking too hard about finding contacts that do the same job as them, when actually the best business contacts can come about through shared interests.
BeBee's focus is to reach out to people who share the same hobby or passion and might also want to do business together further down the line. Within its first year of launch, it claims to have attracted 11 million users, mostly in Spain and Latin America. See bebee.com.