October 15th, 2007
Facebook vs LinkedIn (round three)
Last week, TechCrunch reported that Facebook is rolling out more updates to it API (the hooks provided for third-party developers to create applications for the Facebook platform) which could help the social networking site compete even more directly with LinkedIn, and other “professional” social networks. As well as allowing users to group their “friends” into different categories, such as work associates, Facebook is adding the ability to specify a new kind of desired relationship — networking — along with existing options: “friendship, dating, a relationship, random play or ‘whatever I can get’”, all of which are inappropriate for professional-only social networking.
It’s not hard to see how this new addition to Facebook’s API would allow for all sorts of LinkedIn-esque functionality to be added by third-party applications or even by Facebook itself.
From TechCrunch:
Once launched, Facebook (or third party developers) could add a lot of functionality around networking. Applications could be developed that show a social graph for users who’ve said they want to network that goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could build a LinkedIn-type networking application within the overall Facebook network. And that could be very bad for LinkedIn in the long run.
However, having previously argued that, with a few added features (many of which now exist or are on their way) Facebook could render LinkedIn and other “professional” social networking sites unnecessary, I’m now not so sure. Despite the opportunity to grow from its college campus roots, into a hipper more organic version of LinkedIn, there are a number of reasons why Facebook is unlikely to ever replace my own use of the “professional” networking site — not least of which is the usability chaos that has been created by the Facebook platform. (Also add the lack of data export.)
By allowing all and any third-party developers to create Facebook applications, the site has become a playground for all sorts of useless, but arguably fun, features, and well as a few useful ones. The problem is the spammy or viral nature in which these applications replicate themselves onto someone’s Facebook profile. At the weekend I visited a friend’s Facebook profile to leave a happy birthday message on their wall. Five minutes later, and I was still trying to fathom which “wall” to leave it on, as they’d installed multiple third-party “walls”. Worse still, if I picked any wall except the default one (which I couldn’t find), I was required to add that application to my own profile first, or at least give it permission to access my data, before I could leave a message. The same process is required to interact with almost any third-party application — you must install it first or accept its terms and conditions.
I asked a few friends why they had installed so many applications, many of which more or less add the same functionality, and the frequent answer was that it wasn’t intentional. On one level, they’d been “tricked” into doing so. Maybe they aren’t tech-savvy enough, but that’s the whole point. Facebook has become a mess — and don’t get me started on the complex UI for Facebook’s privacy settings, most of which goes out the window anyway, once you start adding third-party apps. How Facebook hopes to balance this anarchy, along with co-existing as a professional network, I just don’t know.
In this respect, LinkedIn fear not. I’m a great believer in a service that sticks to one or two things, and does them well, and LinkedIn is certainly that.
But wait. LinkedIn plans to add its own API, right? So what then?
Dan Nye, the chief executive of LinkedIn, was recently quoted in the New York Times as saying:
“We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open A.P.I. letting people do whatever they want… We’re not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other.”
To that end, LinkedIn’s developer platform won’t be open, in the sense that anybody can create applications. Instead, LinkedIn will partner only with those that can add genuine value, and will share ad-revenue as a result.
Phew!
Although this won’t necessarily go down too well in Silicon Vallley, which still seems obsessed with Facebook’s so-called “open” platform, even though it isn’t really open at all.
Steve O'Hear is a London-based consultant, educator, and journalist, focussing on the Internet and all aspects of digital technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
