January was an eventful month for “the” social networks. On Jan, 27 LinkedIn filed their IPO paperwork with the SEC. They now have 90 million registered users and (probably ) over $200M in revenues. While the company is not profitable, they are pretty close to breaking even and what makes them more attractive is that they’ve been able to more than double their revenues from 2009 to 2010. A good breakdown of the date LinkedIn shared with SEC is here.

Earlier in the month, Facebook got valued at $50B by Goldman Sachs, who tried to get a piece of the action by investing $450M on behalf of its wealthy, private clients. 

And MySpace, the first “default” social network slid further and faster down its path to irrelevance by laying off half of its staff and its parent company News Corp announcing their intention to sell Myspace. About 5 years ago News Corp paid $500+ million for MySpace. Now it is speculated that the next bidder will stay in the $50-200M range. 

I can’t imagine such steep rises and falls in any other business. When MySpace announced that it had reached 100M users in August, 2006 - less than 5 years ago - Facebook had about 10M and LinkedIn had about 5-6 million users then. Looking at this experience, if someone came with a fresh networking concept and claimed that he could build the next Facebook in 5 years, it would be hard to ridicule the idea.