LinkedIn and The Future of Business Networking
In the heyday of the Facebook hype (it seems so long ago now!), Facebook was going to eat LinkedIn's lunch. Based on recent experience, I don't think so. — I recently had reason to use LinkedIn seriously, using my existing network to tap …
Context & Ripple Effects
The question of whether Facebook displaces LinkedIn has an arc in this corpus: Jeff Pulver publicly defected in July with his Goodbye LinkedIn. Hello Facebook. post, and by October LinkedIn was answering with a guarded platform opening of its own — plans to open up in a closed sort of way. This piece pushes back on the defection narrative, arguing from firsthand use that tapping a professional network still works better on LinkedIn.
What makes the counterargument timely is Facebook's own trajectory that same month: the confirmed $240 million Microsoft investment at a $15 billion valuation, the new advertising platform with Fan pages drawing comparisons to MySpace, and rumored follow-on funding. The author's read is that Facebook's momentum is pointed at consumers and advertisers, not at replacing the business contact graph.
First-order effects
- LinkedIn enters its own platform launch with the core objection answered — the argument that professionals would migrate wholesale to Facebook now has public pushback from someone who actually used both networks for real business tasks.
- Facebook's November moves (SocialAds, Fan pages, the Microsoft round) commit it to an advertiser-facing identity, which is precisely the direction the article cites as evidence it will not prioritize business networking.
Second-order effects
- LinkedIn's October openness plan hardens from optionality into competitive necessity: if Facebook's widgets — including LinkedIn account-link tools — blur the boundary between networks, LinkedIn must control its own developer surface to keep the professional graph inside its walls.
- Developers building business-oriented Facebook widgets are effectively arbitraging the two graphs, which pressures both platforms to define what data flows across the divide and who monetizes it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social networking bifurcates rather than consolidates: one winner-take-all consumer social graph alongside durable vertical professional networks, each protected by different network-liquidity dynamics — connections carry context (résumé, endorsement, work history) that a generic friend graph does not replicate.
- That bifurcation sets up the longer regulatory and strategic question of interoperability: when identity and contacts span multiple networks, portability between them becomes the contested ground rather than any single platform's feature set.
The trend: Professional networking is separating from the general-purpose social graph, with LinkedIn betting that context-rich business ties resist absorption by consumer platforms no matter how large their valuations grow.