For the past few days I have noticed a few friend recommendations in Facebook that seemed odd. My Facebook network is only connected to relatives and folks I went to school with. So to see a few folks that I had no mutual friends on Facebook was puzzling to me.

I scanned through a few recommendations tonight and noticed a pattern of the “non-relatives” they were all connections on LinkedIn! So basically Facebook found me over on LinkedIn and then started recommending some of my business contacts to me as friends.

From a Social Networking perspective this is very interesting. Facebook of course wants to expand beyond “just friends” and move into LinkedIn’s business contact space. This is interesting as it will be a much harder job for LinkedIn to move into Facebook’s social space.

LinkedIn’s success is mostly likely due to its professional focus and its easy to use suite of features. However moving into larger non-professional Social Networking Service (SNS) realm would remove this competitive advantage they have in the current PNS space, which is size. The long term success of any Professional Networking Service (PNS) site is due to their ability to grow and continue growing. Right now LinkedIn is the largest site and current users invite most of the new users. They are much larger than any of their current PNS competitors.

If LinkedIn moved into the SNS space they would enter as the #3 player if somehow all of their current users also created personal profiles. However 74% of their users already have personal profile on MySpace and Facebook. It would not be likely that a large portion of these LinkedIn users would leave MySpace or Facebook because then they would loose connections to their current non-professional networks since 0% of MySpace users have a LinkedIn profile and only 2% of Facebook users do. (stats from Harvard Business Review’s case study of LinkedIn)

As well since many people want to separate their professional lives from their personal lives there would have to be rules in place to determine who would see what content. For example a user might not want their professional contacts to see posts and photos of their children or their drunken vacation photos in Cancún.

LinkedIn could branch out with a separate brand that would allow them to easily offer personal profiles to their existing users. This would allow their current professional users to use familiar tools and interfaces in a personal setting and would allow them to leverage their current server based tools and infrastructure, yet not create an invasion of privacy which might alienate the large 90% of their user base that is concerned about contact privacy and unless they have features that Facebook or MySpace did not have they would have a hard time attracting those users away from their current social networks.

So is this the beginning of the end for LinkedIn as the giant Facebook moves in on the Professional Networking Space?

  • Share/Bookmark