Is Facebook challenging LinkedIn for business networking?
Posted Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 at 11:04 am by John Brian (91 posts)
I logged into Facebook this morning to see an update that they’d revised their privacy policies. The revisions allow people 
to set different levels of privacy for different friend groups, as well as set what friends of friends can see. I see this as a direct challenge to LinkedIn for dominance in the business networking sphere.
This is a change that’s been brewing for a while. Late last year, they added friend lists, which let you categorize your friends in whatever taxonomies you wanted (how you know them, where they live, frequently referenced friends, etc). This was helpful when you needed to find a particular friend, but not for much else.
Now, by linking privacy controls to these friend lists, it allows people to friend folks on Facebook that you normally wouldn’t, knowing that you can use privacy controls to connect them to your contact information, but not your photos from New Year’s. It also allows you to be less restrained in your posting of content, as long as you’re careful to sort your friends correctly (and I predict that in about a week we’ll start to see stories about people who accidentally dropped their boss into the "college friends" category and the ensuing results).
The big implication that I see here is that Facebook wants to be the site for business networking. Already, many younger and more web-savvy people I meet offer to connect with Facebook, though LinkedIn remains the tool of choice for business, in part because of its blandness.
I’m betting that Facebook will see success in this endeavor – they already have 68 million users, and if just one percent add one new user per month using Facebook as their business network tool, they’ll grow the network by more than eight million users in a year (not taking into account the new users bringing in people, or other growth). This doesn’t even take into account the value of the data and connections from additional networking; Facebook’s real business has always been data, and the more people link to each other, the more Facebook is able to put together a complete personal profile for advertisers.
