YakShaving

For a long time now, I’ve wondered if there was ever going to be a day when LinkedIn and Facebook would converge into one.  It seemed crazy a few years ago, I know, but not really now.  Both are social networking applications that allow you to have groups of friends.  Why not just give people the chance to segregate your profile for “friends” vs professional contacts.
LinkedIn had a marvelous chance to become a digital resume– Because it has the recommendation feature and allows potential employers to get a snapshot of what a person is really like from their peers, bosses, and teams that they’ve worked with.

Facebook captured the college market and soon started taking high school users and even enterprise employees.  Some companies are using it as their online profiling application in lieu of using or even creating their own (By the way, I think this may be a mistake for reasons that I won’t get into now).

There’s been a fair amount written about Identity 2.0.  If you have been following along, there’s a general sense that people have different online personas and have a strong desire to keep the personas separate.  On the other side, sites have an interest in keeping their user base authentic and unique.  Every visitor that comes to the site, in other words, should have only one User ID/login.  This prevents shills and improves the community.

Now that facebook is tackling this important problem, there’s a possibility that this convergence will come.
By the way, the reason I haven’t been posting as much is because I’ve been holed up reading for Systems class and trying to wrap my head around Chuck Owens’ Structured Planning process.  The late nights don’t look like they will end any time soon, unfortunately!  I have a lot in the pipeline to post about, so I’ll make a concerted effort to move one by one from “draft” to “publish” soon.