Apparently Jeff Pulver has stopped using LinkedIn for business social networking. This comes on the back of various other luminaries doing the same and predicting the replacement of LinkedIn by Facebook as the defacto Enterprise networking platform. I think they’re missing the point. Not all ‘friends’ are created equal; socialising and networking are two distinct activities. The divide between the two groups has decidedly fuzzy edges but it still exists.

I used MySpace for networking within the music and art communities. Many of my ‘friends’ were random strangers whose music I enjoyed or artwork I liked. LinkedIn is very similar. While I know most of my contacts I’m not necessarily friends with all of them. On Facebook, however, I know every person in my friends list. Incidentally, I think the term ‘friend’ is far more suited to Facebook than it is to MySpace and that’s why it’s taking off so virulently - the behaviour it encourages is far closer to that which we display in real life. Sociomimetic, Charles?

Facebook mimics my offline social network. I know everyone in it and keep up with them either directly - a drink after work or an email exchange - or indirectly, through other friends. I still do the former but Facebook has taken over the information distribution role of the latter. LinkedIn, on the other hand, substitutes for the stack of business cards I have mouldering on my shelves and collection of half-recollected email addresses that languish in my address book. These aren’t people I necessarily keep in touch with frequently but I certainly don’t want to forget about them.

LinkedIn is a network but it’s not really social. It’s about collecting not interacting and that’s how I want my networking to be. I don’t put my friends and my business associates in the same bucket. There’s some overlap (everyone at Trampoline is in my friends list, for example) but I certainly don’t want to turn the CEO of the company I was consulting for last year into a zombie. It’s simply not appropriate.

I’m definitely not saying that Facebook has no place in the enterprise - I expect it to function like a virtual coffee machine or water cooler - but I don’t think the form of socialising that it promotes necessarily threatens LinkedIn. In fact, I think the two could play very well together… A LinkedIn Facebook app, anyone?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 4:31 pm and is filed under Enterprise 2.0, Internet, Social networks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.