Battle of the Social Networks

There seems to be a "Battle of the Social Networks" going on out there in cyberspace. The heavyweight battle being fought between LinkedIn and Facebook and people wanting to know which one to put there time into and who will come out the victor. I have profiles on both sites and connect to people via both sites. The question of which one will come out ahead is way to early to tell. LinkedIn has always been positioned as business networking and making connections through the people you know. Facebook started out only for college kids but then opened up to everyone.

These are some of the questions and challenges out there that eventually may or may not be decided:

• Does there need to be a champion? Can't we have multiple networks that may serve slightly different purposes?
• There are a lot of rules that need to be defined in terms of who we connect with.
• Relationships are a vague thing these days even in the physical world. We merge a lot between our social and business worlds. A big question is who do we connect to? What is a friend in the online world.
• A big difference between Facebook and LinkedIn is the Facebook platform. Facebook is allowing developers to build apps to run on it's platform. Now LinkedIn probably doesn't need the ability to throw food at people there are certainly business related purposes to these functions such as allowing a Twitter feed, a RSS feed from your blog, or your profile on Shelfari to share your business library.
  
• Social Networks need to create multiple levels of friendships and relationships. You should be able to limit in greater detail who can see what.
• No business person should allow drunk photos of themselves on any website:) Need to keep in mind that whatever you put out there even if just to your "friends" can get around.

The social networking world will continue to grow and evolve and in the end it may be neither Facebook or LinkedIn. In the meantime, I will continue to work with and learn from both.

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