Oi! You've been poking my friends...

I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Facebook is the new big thing in professional networking.  I signed up while researching an earlier blog piece, and I’ve started to receive friend requests at an increasing rate.  It blur's the line between the wildly successful social networking site MySpace, and the wildly successful (but oh! so frustrating) professional networking site, LinkedIn.

I think that the big difference between Friendster and LinkedIn is the inclusion of a photograph…it sounds trivial, but you get a totally different scale of reaction to finding the picture of a friend, than finding the name of a friend.

There is another huge reason:  Its underlying technology allows other companies to write applications, using Facebook as a platform.  For a detailed analysis of the pro’s and con’s of this approach, have a look at Marc Andreessen’s blog (He founded Netscape, so he knows a thing or two).

One of the quirky aspects of Facebook is the idea of “poking”.  Apparently you can just poke people, and then they are informed you’ve poked them.  And you can see your friend’s friend’s pictures.  I wonder if it’s safe.

— Philip Greenwood (Your Open-networking Project Leadership Friend)

Tags:  Facebook, Professional+Networking, Networking, LinkedIn, Social+Networking

Comments

[John]

If you are looking at a combination of Facebook and LinkedIn, then check out Konnects. It focuses on professional networking and communities.

[Social Project Management]

Since your blog is about project management, I thought I'd mention a new social project management platform called @task Stream. It takes the concepts of social networking and applies them to project teams and project management. Very cool stuff. You can see what I'm talking about at http://www.attask.com/stream.