Disclosures up front:  I’m not a financial analyst, mind reader or anything resembling a stock broker and as I didn’t buy in to LNKD at market open I’m just a bystander in this game. Normally I wouldn’t touch an IPO post for all those reasons and many more, but given that LinkedIn is now the biggest IPO since Google and trading at over 500 times its 2010 income, I think it’s worth spending a moment to talk about the value of LinkedIn as a game changer, not a stock.

 [ Wondering if it’s worth buying? If you want a financial answer go read a blog from someone qualified to discuss that. ]

What makes LinkedIn’s IPO unique to me and worth spending even a few minutes writing about is how different it and the web are versus a decade ago. I’m not suggesting that a 500+ times earning valuation is somehow better now but rather that LinkedIn sits in a class of businesses [not just websites] we didn’t have in the late 90s.

Back in the dotcom bubble [hopefully never to be referred to as the first internet bubble] we saw companies hit milestones relative to the web. It seemed impressive when Webvan or Geocities or Yahoo added a few million users and if you worked in the web, it was… those were big percentages of the active user base but they were tiny to the world or even to North America where most were focused.

LinkedIn’s is different. They aren’t operating on a scale of web impressive, they’re at 100 million: this is North America, even world impressive [see infographic timeline]. No business has connected more professionals about being professional than LinkedIn. Reach may not equate to billions in earnings or justify 8 billion in value this afternoon [again, not evaluating their stock here] but if you want to talk about influence, potential and value… LinkedIn can wake up and tell pretty much the entire working world something because they want too.

Facebook will be the same. Reaching over 10% of the world’s population on a weekly if not daily basis is something few businesses can say.  What happens if they wake up and decide to ask every user in the world to write a review of Ford? How much conversation, perception and potential impact could that have?

These are a few names who define how the world thinks and works. That we all use them every day, have them in TV commercials and have no qualms putting them on our own websites says just how much they are a part of our market already. Add to that the simple reality that these businesses that are bringing in cash and it’s different.

No wonder why the perception of value is so high – no matter what the price tag, these companies are game changers to our world. What that’s worth, if that will hold, if it’s safe is again, up for discussion.