LinkedIn's IPO Social Media

Adam Ostrow is editor-in-chief of tech news internet site Mashable.

(CNN) -- When the dust settled on LinkedIn's IPO on Thursday afternoon, the organization was valued at $8.9 billion, making it worth a lot more than household names like JC Penney, Electronic Arts and Chipotle.

LinkedIn's IPO Social Media

As the greatest World wide web IPO considering that Google and also the first pure social networking site to go public, its jaw-dropping opening-day surge of 109% will also go down as a watershed moment for the Internet, as historically substantial as the debuts of Netscape in 1995, TheGlobe.com in 1998 and Google in 2004.LinkedIn's IPO Social Media

Whereas Netscape's IPO symbolized the dawn of the dotcom boom, TheGlobe.com's epitomized the height of irrational exuberance and Google's ushered in a renaissance of tech innovation soon after the internet bubble burst, LinkedIn's debut will be remembered as social media's arrival on the capitalist stage identified as Wall Street.

For starters, LinkedIn's lofty valuation by most anyone's standards (at Thursday's closing price of $94, it is trading at 36 times its 2010 revenue; Google trades at five times) will have venture capitalists scrambling to take their Net investments public.