Facebook Has LinkedIn In Their Crosshairs
Facebook may be used for professional networking (particularly in Silicon Valley), but it sure isn't set up to be. People's profiles are all about their dating status, pictures, videos and other very personal information.
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands one day after LinkedIn announced plans to open up — a deliberately guarded openness that reads differently now that TechCrunch frames Facebook as aiming at its territory. The timing matters: LinkedIn is loosening its walls just as the largest social graph on the web turns toward business networking.
The tension the piece names is real inside Facebook itself: Silicon Valley professionals already use it for work contacts, yet profiles are built around dating status, photos and videos. That mismatch sits alongside a hot autumn for the company — an applications platform drawing developer showcases at Community Next, a promised 'killer feature', panel chatter of a rumored $100B valuation, and a disputed comScore dip in September unique visitors.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn's openness push, announced October 12, now has to function as defense: it is opening a closed network in direct response to a rival whose reach dwarfs its own.
- Facebook faces an immediate product problem — its profile template (dating status, photos, videos) actively works against the professional use its own Valley user base is already practicing.
Second-order effects
- Developers on Facebook's applications platform gain a new target market: professional-networking apps that retrofit work identity onto a personal-graph product, competing with LinkedIn's native structure.
- Recruiters and employers choosing between the two get a pricing and coverage question — LinkedIn's curated business graph versus Facebook's far larger but messier one — which pressures LinkedIn to differentiate on data quality rather than exclusivity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networks stop being defined by which graph they hold and start competing on context — whether one identity can serve both personal and professional life, or whether the two stay structurally separate products.
- A contested professional-networking market also raises the stakes on engagement metrics themselves: the disputed comScore figures show how much valuation narratives (the rumored $100B talk) now depend on traffic numbers neither side fully trusts.
The trend: Social networking in late 2007 is consolidating around graph ownership, pushing general-purpose networks like Facebook into vertical territory like LinkedIn's before either has solved the identity-context problem.