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Stealing some of his material from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on the matter, Nye said people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life. The argument, self serving as it is, makes a certain amount of sense. Not good to have a prospective employer stumble on to those photos of you freshman year in Delta Kappa Epsilon. After the inevitable social net shakeout, Nye says, Facebook and MySpace will remain standing and will compete to supply an outlet for personal self-expression and community. Meanwhile, in the Nye/Hoffman scenario, LinkedIn will dominate the business of business networking — serving as a “productivity tool,” used for professional reference checking, recruiting, and to get expert advice. Granted, LinkedIn’s current growth does look promising. With upwards of 11 million members already signed up, the site is now adding 180,000 new members each week, and fully half of these live outside the United States. Thus, Nye professes little fear of would be competitors like the European front-runner Xing.com. “We are clearly going to win the English speaking world and adjacent economies,” he said. “And that already is pretty meaningful.” In Silicon Valley, he added, “LinkedIn is now so prevalent that you sort of have to join it.” Fair enough - the company has got lift. But the dual profile argument only goes so far. It’s not entirely clear why smart use of privacy controls and tabbed pages couldn’t render Facebook perfectly adquate for professional use. If there is a winner-takes-all dynamic in social networking, why would it stop so conveniently at the professional-personal boundary? And if LinkedIn is growing fast, its growth remains practically sluggish compared to Facebook’s rate of 150,000 new members each day. Wouldn’t it at least be smart, then, for LinkedIn to deploy itself as an application on Facebook, given Facebook’s new open API strategy? Quite possibly, said Nye who pointed out that Hoffman was an early investor in Facebook, and that Facebook backer Peter Thiel also has money in LinkedIn. “We know each other well,” said Nye. “We like each other.” Bottom line: the jury is still divided on how much consolidation to expect in social networks, but it will be interesting to see how all these real world social networks hold up when their virtual counterparts begin to merge, or falter…. Posted by oliverryan 4:22 pm 13 Comments
 | Add a comment LinkedIn - I’m not impressed. It’s a glorified resume service. For real online business networking, there are better options out there including Fast Pitch! Don’t believe me? See for yourself - Compare Networks >> Posted By Johnny S., Sarasota, FL : October 12, 2007 11:28 pm
I’m surprised that this is being described as a winner-take all game. There is plenty of room for niche players in social networking, just like there is plenty of room for small independent microbreweries, which thrive in the same market as the Budweisers and Coors of the world. Business social networks like Biznik.com, for example, address the unique needs of independent business owners. It’s a big world, and there are room for lots of winners. Posted By Dan McComb, Seattle, WA : July 28, 2007 11:45 pm
Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace are just another tool for internet advertisers to market useless products and services. These sites don’t fill any real need other than making the founders and investors rich. But since people are going to fall for it, I applaud them. I hope they make billions off of mindless consumers. Posted By Yadgyu, Harkeyville, TX : June 13, 2007 11:12 pm
During my last job search, several of my prospective employers required LinkedIn references, which I found interesting. The main problem I see with Linkedin is the inevitable abuse. I continually get people who want me to link to them simply because we served in the same 500,000 man Army or 80,000 employee defense contractor. What’s the point in having a huge anonymous network? Also, it’s quite easy to fake the recommendations. To me, its a false sense of security if employers are relying on LinkedIn for biographies and reference checks. Posted By Blake Newman, Los Angeles, CA : June 13, 2007 12:34 pm
As a 20 year IT recruiter and blogger, he’s missing a big issue. TODAY, that’s the mix of users of Facebook and Linkedin. Age is the key. I’ll bet Facebook goes more professional as it’s current user base ages. Posted By Mike Tiffany, St. Louis, MO : June 13, 2007 12:15 pm
 LinkedIn’s approach to connecting business people is certainly useful but is it really business networking? It depends upon one’s definition. If you want to build relationships as part of your networking activity then Ecademy.com is superior in many ways. Posted By bookmarklee : June 13, 2007 2:24 am
 I know everyone is on the “love train” right now with attitude-ego-from-hell zuckerberg right now, but I’m 38 and I know a lot of people on LinkedIn, and the only ppl I know on Facebook are there monitoring their kids. So they’re going to have to wait a generation for those “kids” to grow up before they “dominate” social networking. Posted By mike454 : June 13, 2007 2:08 am
 “We like each other” sounds like a compatible attitude, but really what water doe it hold? There is no reason in the world Facebook can start a LinkedIn-type unit as a business platform. It will be interesting to see how that goes. Posted By 20weblogs.com/munity : June 12, 2007 1:51 pm
“We are clearly going to win the English speaking world and adjacent economies” A very short-sited, over-confident, and ignorant statement. He’s predicting a future of which he really has no control. I think it’s more likely that Facebook will be left standing. They seem to be the only big social/business network out there who truly ‘gets it’. Opening up their API and allowing people to profit from it is brilliant to say the least. Words of advice for Mr. Nye: Pride comes before disaster, and arrogance before a fall. Posted By Frank, Albeta : June 12, 2007 11:09 am
His comments may be self serving, but he’s absolutely right. The personal/professional divide in social networking mirrors a similar divide in social reality. There may be some bleed over between the two, which is reflected by the fact that I am connected to a handful of people on both Facebook and LinkedIn. On the whole though, those worlds will (and should) remain comfortably separate. Posted By David Kaye, Los Angeles, CA : June 12, 2007 2:56 am
ContextWeb employees use LinkedIn’s service extensively and find it a good way to network with peers and potential clients for our ADSDAQ exchange. I think some companies see LinkedIn as a threat in that employees supposedly end up job hopping due to the connections they make. Quite the opposite here. Posted By John Ebbert, New York, NY : June 11, 2007 9:36 pm
I disagree with the comment that Facebook will be able to fulfill the business networking function that LinkedIn currently fulfills. The demograhics and needs for the LinkedIn audience is very different from the social networking facebook user - and this shows up in the different busienss features available on LinkedIn. Clearly, there is a no-no involved here! Posted By Shomic / Atlanta : June 11, 2007 5:19 pm
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In the future, everyone will likely maintain two online profiles. So said 
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All it takes for Facebook to overtake Linkedin in the business networking world is the right application. I think Kuhnektid could be that application.