Facebook's Killer Feature Coming Soon
Back in August I suggested that if Facebook allowed you to place your friends in specific groups (e.g. professional, social, family, etc) and assign custom privacy settings, LinkedIn would be doomed. While Facebook is going to have to work toward putting …
Context & Ripple Effects
This story extends a month-old thread: back in August, Inside Facebook flagged speculation that the site was building Friend Lists, and asked then what segmented sharing would mean for Top Friends and for LinkedIn. AllFacebook now picks the same thread up with the sharpest version of the argument — that grouped friends with per-group privacy settings would let one profile serve professional, social, and family audiences at once.
The timing matters because Facebook enters October with real momentum behind it: confirmed coverage has it rising to third place in page-view rankings as of mid-September and launching the fbFund grant program with Accel and Founders Fund at TechCrunch40. A privacy-segmentation feature aimed squarely at LinkedIn's core use case lands while Facebook is already pulling users and developers toward its platform. Note the LinkedIn-doomed claim is an analyst's argument, not a confirmed outcome — and the friend-grouping launch itself is still unconfirmed rumor.
First-order effects
- If the grouping feature ships as described, users gain per-audience privacy controls inside Facebook, letting a single account serve family, social, and professional contacts without separate profiles.
- LinkedIn's clearest differentiator — a graph kept deliberately separate from personal networking — faces direct erosion the moment casual Facebook contacts can be walled off into a professional tier.
Second-order effects
- LinkedIn is pushed into a defensive product cycle, forced to justify standalone membership against a free feature inside the larger network rather than competing on recruiting features alone.
- Facebook's application developers face a new design constraint: widgets and apps built during the fbFund-era open-platform push now have to behave differently depending on which friend group is viewing them.
Third-order effects
- If one platform successfully hosts every social context, competition among networks shifts from acquiring members to managing context and trust — privacy granularity becomes the feature that determines whether multi-purpose profiles can absorb single-purpose ones like LinkedIn.
- The persistent question in September's coverage — whether users' social graphs reside in Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn — hardens into a structural contest over who owns the master identity record, with portability and lock-in likely drawing regulator and user attention as stakes rise.
The trend: Social networks are converging on the all-in-one profile, with per-context privacy controls emerging as the battleground between general-purpose platforms like Facebook and single-purpose professional graphs like LinkedIn.