Sunday, July 29, 2007

Facebook vs. Linkedin

Because I am a working professional out of school for a decade now LinkedIn has been my social networking tool of choice up until now. Facebook was a closed network for the longest time, targeted first at Harvard students, then at other schools, and now to the whole world.

I joined facebook a few weeks ago and have already caught up with some old college and high-school friends. Facebook has more of a folksy, friendly feel to it. I’ve never had a myspace page, or even dabbled with it much, but I imagine Facebook as something between the strict professionalism of LinkedIn, and the anarchy of myspace.

That said the overlapping of the Facebook and LinkedIn is a little frustrating to me. Not that this hasn’t happened before. I still have profiles on Friendster, orkut, and I think O’Reilly tried something in this space too. But with Facebook and LinkedIn the overlap seems that much more glaring. After all collegues, in the loose definition of the word “friend”, often become Friends. And friends often become Collegues. Indeed Robert Scoble recently covered facebook in a way that gives it an entirely work-based, networking bias.

I’m not sure which one should subsume to which. Whether faceBook should just have a LinkedIn module, or whether LinkedIn should have a more faceBook like feel. Either way, for now, it looks like I’ll stick with both.

Posted by Hadley Stern on 07/29 at 06:47 PM
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