If you have a career, you need to be on LinkedIn. It doesn't matter what industry you are in. It doesn't matter what you do. Eventually, LinkedIn will help you open a door, hire someone, establish a new contact. Take a look at Zimbra's Name hover functionality.

Now image a Greasemonkey plug-in that works with LinkedIn and shows you how you are connected to every name you see in cyberspace. Or maybe just to every name in your 100,000+ big company. Now, the barriers to working with people melt away.

I am not sure what LinkedIn's enterprise plans are, but some kind of service that automatically integrates with a enterprise web mail solution and extends what is available on the open internet version of LinkedIn, will eventually prove too useful for most companies to ignore.

LinkedIn has said that they do not want to create silos, and thus have argued against an enterprise version. I think there are easy ways to accomplish both LinkedIn's objectives and provide useful enterprise functionality. For example, an enterprise LinkedIn could work like a LinkedIn group.

A LinkedIn Enterprise server would automatically link everyone in the company into the group. An Enterprise version would integrate with the company LDAP server, and automatically walk employees through the process of getting a LinkedIn id.

Because the company pays for the enterprise version, the company could display a "certificate", indicating that anyone who claims to be part of the company group on LinkedIn, is really an employee. This certification would add value to both the company and to all LinkedIn users hoping to connect with the company.

LinkedIn also needs to add an API that hooks into their Enterprise Version. The API would enable the company to pull LinkedIn information into other internal applications. For example, a Zimbra style name hover that also shows how people were linked to the name mentioned in an email or on an internal enterprise blog would need that API.

None of this functionality is new, or not already available on LinkedIn, but an enterprise version would enable easier roll-out and use within a big company.

If LinkedIn doesn't make it, someone else will.