more important than relationships. but for now say buy to face to face networking and 4e8 low to media. julia boorstin explains. >> hi, erin. business meetings, networking, conferences, even hiring committees, they're all crucial to business. but now who needs to meet in person? virtual business networks have replaced all of that handshaking. in this economy, there's more pressure than ever to leverage relationships for efficiency and profits. 43 million member business network linked in enables every possible connection. >> i have folks who can help you do their job to help them do their job. >> reporter: they linked mergers and acquisitions, finds the perfect hire, and allows users to poll the network with a question. >> linkedin focuses on how do we pem heem inform productive and how do we help them be a more competitive business, individual professional. >> reporter: the 6-year-old company has been operating profitably since 2007. brought innen estimated one hup $348 in 2008 revenue from subscription service and in a corporate recruiting service. while linkedin is all about professional presentation, some companies take a more creative approach in virtual world's second life. >> they see it as a really powerful tool for training, for conferences, and for collaborations. >> reporter: and a way to cut costs. northr northrop grummond uses it as a teaching tool. other companies use second link for conferences. >> the users replicate the kinds of environments you might find in a trade show. >> reporter: ibm invested $80,000 in a virtual convention center, saving $350,000 on travel and productivity costs on its first conference alone. >> what you soon discover is that you can actually include more people than you would have included before. >> reporter: ibm runs a research group on social software, a lotus allows them to share blogs and contacts. >> preparing presentations, working on a spreadsheet, yorking york i working on your e-mail. >> reporter: while ibm integra integrates social into the soft wor, start-up allows anyone or a company to build a custom network, faux free they can post ads on the site. they post 27 million registered users from a site for saturn car owners to one for national musicians looking to return relationships into profit. >> whether it's a small company or a small business, they're both able to benefit from the power of being able to create and organize a social network. >> last round of financing, linkedin is $1 billion and is considering a ipo. go to cnbc and linkedin are parties to a content sharing agreement. >>> coming up in the next social networking segment tomorrow, we'll be examining the business of twitter, seeing if they can transition all of that buzz into some profit. now over to david faber at cnbc headquarters. >> thank you, julia. >>> let's talk more now about today's deal between giant microsoft and search -- well, let's call it just portal yahoo!. joing us with the insights, internet analyst with jefferies. the stock down 9 1/2%. yahoo! had been up, of course, anticipation of this announ announceme announcement. the lack of an up front payment from microsoft perhaps a disappointing some investors. is that -- is that a framework for looking at this deal and are you disappointed? >> yeah, we're somewhat disappointed. so on the one hand, yes, there is a fact that there is no up front payment, there is a fact that there are no guarantees. there's only a guarantee on the rtf side or price inside but there are no annual guarantees similar to what we saw on the prior -- in the prior offer. so on that, question, i think we are somewhat disappointed.