Like LinkedIn, most of our tools and features are free. However, LinkedIn also has a premium service which is $199.50/year.... http://www.linkedin.com/static?key=business_info_more

While LinkedIn is a great tool for keeping in contact with people you already know, members have to pay a minimum of $19.95/month to reach out to other individuals whom they don’t know or dont share a common contact with. Naymz encourages and empowers our community to extend their networks and meet new, reputable professionals whom they have common interests with.

We are attempting to take a different angle on Professional Social Networking by adding layers of identity verification, social reputation, and online promotion tools. Here is an overview of some of the features that makes us unique from LinkedIn… http://www.naymz.com/micro/compare

Before assuming we are trying to “nickle and dime” you to sign-up for our premium service, I encourage you to take a closer look at what we are offering:

• As part of our Premium Service, Naymz will provide detailed visitor reports which will give you additional information about who visited your profile. This include location (city, state, country), where they found you (google, yahoo, etc.), the IP Address (which will often be associated with a particular company), and name (only when it is a fellow Naymz user and they have their permissions set to allow others to see them). This is something that neither LinkedIn nor Plaxo offers.

• We also will go out and pay for custom sponsored results (advertising) for your name on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This assures that when someone searches for you on the search engines, they can find information that you control at the top of the results. This is something that neither LinkedIn nor Plaxo offers.

• Included with the Premium Service, we will pay for and acquire a personalized domain name (http://tom.drugan.name) and email address (tom@drugan.name) that links to your profile. This also helps your profile rank highly in the natural results of Google and other engines. This is something that neither LinkedIn nor Plaxo offers.

• Naymz also will pay for a Trufina Identity Verification and background check and place a badge on your profile so that visitors to your profile can be assured that you are the person behind the page. This is something that neither LinkedIn nor Plaxo offers.

• We will also remove all advertising from your public profile and from your account when you are logged-in. This is something that neither LinkedIn nor Plaxo offers.

All of these items cost us money to provide to our members, and as much as we would like to give these away from free, we wouldn’t be in business very long if we did. We have a good percentage of our members who are using our premium level service and seem to find it pretty useful.

I hope this sheds some light on our service and intentions. If it hasn’t changed your mind at all about Naymz, we understand and wish you the best of luck over at LinkedIn and Plaxo.