There's more to networking than just catching up with old and long lost school friends or wasting time doing nothing constructive. And this is where business networking comes In. In addltion to posting your profiles on Job portals, signing up with business or professional networking sites will boost the probability of connecting with strategic people and could land you a job. Not just that, professional networking also increases your circle of professional contacts, thereby assisting you in decision making, come an emergency.

Although the idea is more or less the same as social networking, the underlying sentiments are more serious and need greater privacy and integrity. Hence, filtering out spammers becomes all the more important. When you're out there looking out for something serious, the last thing you want is to be linked to by unknown people for no reason.

Essentially, the first thing you look for in a professional networking site is privacy, credibility, integrity and appropriate users to interact with. These will certainly differ from user to user, but we can assess the sites according to their functionality and operability. We looked into the options we had and came across several web sites that claimed to be the one answer to your business networking needs.

The sites that we closed in on in our final comparison were Siliconlndia and Linkedln, in addition to a few other web sites that fell below our expectations. There is a significant difference between Siliconlndia and Linkedln, and so there is a clear winner here. LinkedIn has a very intuitive interface that takes you straight to where you need to go, with a vast storehouse of users. The reason we even included Siliconlndia is that, from an lndian perspective, Siliconlndia.com seems to be the only web site that has a user base of a Significant size. At the last count, it had approximately 3.2 million registered users, more importantly from the Indian subcontinent.