Greg H has some interesting thoughts on Facebook, social media, et. al. - he begins by questioning what they are good at, and notes a big difference between Facebook and LinkedIn:
For one thing, the organizational features of Facebook are atrocious. I'm in a group now that I feel would be very useful for networking going forward: my fellow law school classmates. Check out the myriad ways USF School of Law members/alums have listed the fact that they attend the law school. While I'm sure there are wonderful undergrads, I don't care about networking with them. LinkedIn? Very easy to find fellow USF SoLers. LinkedIn strikes me as being much more interested in people with more structured networks. Facebook -- though less so than MySpace -- seems to eschew structure.
Related to that is the kind of structure Facebook does have. A colleague of mine noted that Facebook seems overly interested in your dating ideas; that's likely a legacy of it being a University oriented tool, but still: if I'm looking at it as a business tool, the initial set of questions don't make me take it seriously. Quite the opposite, actually: I had to get past the initial "obviously, this is for teens and 20-somethings" idea just to get started.
Zuckerman has gone quite a ways with what he's got, but if he wants something that business people are going to take seriously, he has to provide a "No, I'm not looking to hookup next Friday" path into it.
Update: Phil Windley has some related thoughts.
Technorati Tags:
web 2.0, facebook, social media