A MySpace for grown-ups
Social networking has been great for the kids, but not of much use to business - until now. With Reid Hoffman's MySpace-for-grown-ups at a tipping point, these days you're either LinkedIn or left out. — (Business 2.0 Magazine) — At a Starbucks in downtown Mountain View …
Context & Ripple Effects
The framing here is a market splitting along age lines. Six weeks earlier, the Washington Post reported that teens were already calling MySpace 'so last year', even though the site had been the dominant daily hangout for teens and twentysomethings as recently as January 2006. Business 2.0 picks up that thread from the other end: Reid Hoffman's LinkedIn is presented as reaching a tipping point where professional networking becomes a reason to join rather than a chore.
The timing matters because MySpace's consumer franchise has taken two hits this year — the exodus narrative among its youngest users, and a confirmed self-propagating QuickTime worm that rewrote user profiles and pushed links to fraudulent sites. A business-oriented network with no equivalent exposure gets its pitch sharpened by contrast: the same month one network is patching exploits, another is being declared essential.
First-order effects
- Professionals and recruiters face a coordination shift: once LinkedIn crosses the tipping point, absence itself carries a cost, since hiring and deal-flow move to where counterparts maintain profiles.
- Hoffman's company converts network effects into defensibility — each new member makes the service more useful to existing ones, locking in early adopters while the consumer side churns.
Second-order effects
- Advertisers weighing the two networks now have a security and demographics argument on top of reach: a confirmed profile-rewriting worm plus a cooling teen base pushes brand budgets toward professional audiences.
- Other social networking entrants are forced to pick a lane — either compete head-on for the general consumer graph or carve out a vertical identity like careers — rather than building undifferentiated friend networks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking structurally bifurcates: one graph for entertainment and peer hangouts, another for professional identity, with different monetization (recruiting, B2B advertising) than the display-driven consumer model.
- Professional identity becomes a durable online asset people maintain across jobs, making the career-graph owner a gatekeeper position in labor markets — the dynamic Business 2.0's 'you're either LinkedIn or left out' framing anticipates.
The trend: Social networking in late 2006 is fragmenting by use case, separating the consumer hangout graph from an emergent professional-identity graph built on recruiting economics.