Identified Hits 1.5M Active Users, 202M Profiles, But Can It Beat BranchOut (Or LinkedIn)?

The professional networking space has been heating up over the last few years, with a number of players vying for control of our digital resumes, job and employment searches, and career buildings. For all intents and purposes, LinkedIn controls the mindshare, but a couple of newcomers are beginning to give the leader a run for its money. The first is BranchOut, the professional networking service built on top of Facebook, which, like everything Facebook, has been growing like gangbusters since its inception in 2010.
Then there?s San Francisco-based Identified.com, a professed ?data and analytics company? that development its eponymous ?Identified Score? to measure how ?in demand? users? professional backgrounds are to companies ? right now. Of course, both companies have a long way to go before they catch up to LinkedIn, which, going on Q4 numbers has a membership of 150 million-plus registered users. (Not to mention that Viadeo has over 40 million.)
LinkedIn, though, has been the prime mover and professional networking platform of record, surprising many with its continuing, steady growth (and beating Wall Street?s expectations) as a public company.
Of course, in comparison, BranchOut has the benefit of the behemoth that is the 850 million-strong Facebook network to help bring to its professional networking service to the masses (now at 300 million profiles and 10 million registered users). But Identified Co-founder Brendan Wallace is asking questions: Do we really want to use Facebook for professional networking? Do Facebook profiles make for good resumes? According to Wallace, only 8 percent of Facebook profiles have enough information to make them valuable sources of recruitment.
Using Facebook profiles as a launchpad is important, but the Identified Co-founder wants to leverage Facebook data to turn its profiles into more complete professional profiles by adding the educational, employment, and demographic data Facebook is inherently missing. By using Facebook Connect, Identified has