• The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, December 30, 2009 10:52 AM

Since Jeff Weiner took the helm as CEO a year ago membership in the social network for professionals has surged, but is still dwarfed by that of Facebook. But, more important, says The Wall Street Journal, "the amount of time people devote to LinkedIn is a fraction of the time people spend on some other social sites. Visitors spent about 13 minutes on average at LinkedIn during October, while Facebook users logged about 213 minutes and MySpace users spent 87 minutes, according to research firm comScore, which measured the behavior of global users 15 years and older."

Brigantine Advisors analyst Colin Gillis likens the service to a database, and says that LinkedIn is at risk of losing the business networking market to ... Facebook. Many companies already use Facebook for recruitment, but Weiner's plans include out-Facebooking Facebook by enticing users to use the service even when not looking for jobs or contacts, and in the service of this, has opened the network to third-party developers.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »