There’s an analysis report issued by eMarketer looking at the space of time between 2008 and 2012 that takes an educated guess as to what business-to-business marketing spending will look like in four years’ time in the US on social networks specifically. Its research estimates a total of $40 billion in the US this year. In 2012, meanwhile, it predicts more than 500% increase to $210 million.

That may be so. And of course there is only one way to find out. But the figures given are remarkably small. Which means that, if we arrive in 2012 with a B2B tally of $210 million, LinkedIn, Facebook and various other business-centric joints (E.Factor, FohBoh, etc., making up the niched trimmings), might have to look elsewhere to make good on their membership growth.

Demographically, Facebook is open to a much broader inflow of ad dollars, given its multifaceted design as a nexus for both casual users and and professionals. (Some of whom are one and the same.) LinkedIn, however, is less able to build on the portion it will presumably take from the $210 million pie - if indeed that figure does materialize. LinkedIn considers itself likely to register about $100 million in revenue by the end of this year. So whispers that Facebook will supplant its main business-level competition may in fact hold more credibility as the seasons pass. Money talks, right? Facebook is arguably in a better position in that respect. The question to ask then is: Will LinkedIn move ahead with the IPO that many analysts have been scratching for?

Of course, business networking is never going to reign larger than the MySpace class. Consumerism is generally what drives the market. But LinkedIn has to give investors something to look forward to. As do all Web companies of grand designs. Yes, its membership is quite valuable in and of itself. But that value has not been tapped in a way anything analogous to, say, Facebook’s expansion into third-party developerland with its Platform launch in 2007. LinkedIn more and more umph to stay ahead. How it manages to do that is the billion dollar answer.

(Image credits: eMarketer (top); Jayderagon.com)

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Why all the lists heading into 2008? Well, laziness. That, and the urge to reflect on the year gone by. No, mostly laziness. And in that spirit, we present you Valleywag’s top 10 list of top 10 lists. Oh yeah — our lazy, it’s meta.

The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists
• 10. Wired’s “The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007” makes our list because it points out why everyone wants an iPhone. Apple’s genius ads.
• 9.The New York Times’ “Buzzwords 2007” can has number 9.
  
  
• 8. eMarketer’s Predictions for 2008 makes our list because we’re so handy with their charts.
  
  
• 7. Tumblr founder David Karp’s 2008 Tech Predictions.
  

  Google will launch the Web Service competitors GStorage, GCompute, and GAmazonFlexiblePaymentService.

• 6.Your Best Shot 2007 Samplr, collected by Flickr, features the most interestingness of any list in our top ten.
  
  
• 5.Silicon Alley VC blogger Fred Wilson sure can pick ‘em. No, not startups. Rock bands. Like the ones in his Top Ten Records 2007.
  function streampadPop(l,n){window.open(”http://flash.streampad.com/playerL.swf?autostart=yes&list=”+l+”&songNumber=”+n, “Streampad”,”toolbar=no,width=200,height=300,resizable=yes”);}
  
• 4.The second Wired entry — out of nearly a dozen folks, so there’s real competition here! — to make our list has to be The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007 because it reviews how we did playing God last year.
  

  Cancer-fighting Clostridium bacteria
  Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation treatment mean that a cancer diagnosis is no longer always a death sentence. But certain oxygen-starved parts of tumors are still difficult to reach with the old methods. Enter the Clostridium family of bacteria. Injected into the body, they grow and multiply only in the oxygen-poor parts of cancer tumors. In September, scientists in the Netherlands showed they could arm Clostridium bacteria with therapeutic protein genes, essentially creating search-and-destroy tumor missiles.

• 3.We’re not going to pretend we understand the Large Hadron Collider, which comes online in 2008, according to Ars Technica’spredictions for 2008. “The Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, and dark matter candidates all beckon,” Chris Lee writes. We’ll just show you this neat video.
  newVideoPlayer(”Ars_LHC.flv”, 475, 376);
  

• 2.Tech CEOs say the darndest things, don’t they? Like remember when Zuck said media changes every 100 years? Wired’s editors do, and they bring it all back in their 2007 Foot-in-Mouth Awards.
  

  There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get. — Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the iPhone, which is outselling all Windows Mobile phones combined.

• 1. How’s this for meta? We’re going to declare Valleywag’s own “The Web’s top 10 top 10 lists” the winner. Meta FTW!

(Photo by andrer69)