Armchair Theorist

Like most people, I started my foray into social networking by joining Friendster when it was first launched in 2002. Then, when LinkedIn arrived the next year, I also joined. LinkedIn was positioned as a “serious” social network for businesses, which I found pretty boring at the time, compared to all of the cool stuff that Friendster could do.

Later on, Facebook came along, and it quickly became the mother of all modern social networking innovation. I was promptly swept up into Facebook Mania, and signed up last year. I thoroughly enjoyed using Facebook, even until today, and marveled at all the applications and possibilities that a social networking platform provided. Imagine the possibilities! From one single set of social graph data, you can have applications ranging from the frivolous (Vampires vs. Werewolves) to the semi-useful (Visual Bookshelf) to the outright indispensable (Marketplace).

I decided that I don’t need any other social network besides Facebook, and promptly deleted my Friendster and LinkedIn accounts.

And last week I reinstated my LinkedIn account again. Why?

The simple answer is that I realized that Facebook just isn’t conducive in fulfilling my business needs. I think there are a couple reasons for this:

Different Culture

Although the Facebook platform is incredibly versatile and can theoretically be purposed into any type of social network, the truth is that the applications that live in Facebook (which gives Facebook its identity and defines its culture) are overwhelmingly on the frivolous side rather than the utility side.

A chart speaks a thousand words, and by now, many people would have seen this chart:

As one can see, most people use Facebook applications for fun, and very few for business. Ben Rattray gives an excellent analysis on Andrew Chen’s blog which explains why this is so, but I think the following quote sums it up best:

Just because something can fit inside Facebook from a functionality standpoint doesn’t mean it will fit the site’s culture, and culture on social sites matters.

Different Crowds

Most computer engineers like me are idealists, and most idealists enjoy the elegance provided by the model of every individual owning a single social graph, and having all your applications and interactions ride on top of that social graph.

Unfortunately, the real world is doesn’t work that way.

Like it or not, we all have different social graphs for different contexts. For example, some of my friends who are on Facebook may not even bother with LinkedIn because they may be in a profession (performance arts) that doesn’t require the type of business networking that LinkedIn provides.

Conversely, while there are folks who would not hesitate to connect to me in LinkedIn (headhunters and clients), but they may not bother with or connect to me in a more relaxed environment like Facebook.

Therefore, it is no wonder that if one does a job search in LinkedIn versus a job search in the Facebook marketplace, one should find the results from LinkedIn of higher quality and relevance than that of Facebook.

A social network’s crowd determines the culture, and the culture determines the identity. LinkedIn simply has an identity that makes it more conducive for business.

Someday, Facebook will have technology which allows us to take manageable subsets out of our primary social graph and be able to leverage them in different and isolated contexts.

Until then I will happily maintain both my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles.

See Also:

• 3 Social Media Applications I Left Recently
• From One Empire to Another Empire
• The Web 2.0 Startup Scale: from “Hatchlings” to “Borgs”