One of those debates that seems to resurface every few weeks among the Enterprise Irregulars is whether LinkedIn is the most valuable social networking tool since e-mail or just an online cheat sheet for pushy recruiters and annoying sales reps trying to angle their way into a big score. 

The trigger for today’s EI exchange was Michael Copeland’s puff piece from Business 2.0 which portrayed LinkedIn as A MySpace for Grownups and suggested that it is close to a “tipping point,” which I interpret to mean that the three-year-old company and its 8 million users are soon due to be marched down the aisle by some deep-pocketed suitor.  (The article certainly reads like a wedding announcement written by the bride’s mother but then Business 2.0 is not exactly known for hardhitting journalism.)

I happen to find LinkedIn practically useless and forget to check it for weeks at a time and I’m not alone in being underwhelmed but there are other EIs who swear by it.

“I use LinkedIn on practically a daily basis - and I find it invaluable,” says CRM guru Chris Selland.  “I’m a bus dev guy so developing and building relationships is what I do.  For other purposes I’m sure it might not be so valuable, but it clearly is a tool where you get out of it what you put into it.”

Another believer is Ismael Ghalimi, founder and CEO of Intalio, who is quoted in the Business 2.0 article, probably because he has an amazing personal LinkedIn success story to tell.  But, he is concerned about the inherent tension between the passive users who make up the bulk of LinkIn’s subscribers and power users who account for most of the activity.

Zoli Erdos says he was a fairly active user in the early days, but for the past year or so his blog and people who contact him through it has entirely replaced LinkedIn.

“I do know for a fact that recruiters love it and with the ‘new’ pricing scheme they are in fact the primary customers for LinkedIn’s services,” Erdos says.  He adds that he believes that ”superlinkers,” like Christian Mayaud mentioned in the Business 2.0 article are “abusing the system, IMHO.  It should be a reflection of one’s real life network, not a collection of 10k records.”

Rod Boothby says a major business problem with LinkedIn is that it has have been slow to do things like create an enterprise gateway into its service, and create open APIs.   The result, he says, is a limited “be my friend” list.

“LinkedIn tells you who knows whom, but it does not give you an idea of the quality of those relationships,” Boothby says.  “As such, I have only found it useful occasionally as a tool for connections through one degree of separation. 

“A more powerful tool than LinkedIn would show how people actually work together.   The tool would help you get work done, and only include the social network as a positive externally, much as enterprise blogs and wikis focus on facilitating communication around active work projects first, and only produce ‘knowledge’ as a side benefit. “