Intelligent thoughts on Facebook and social networks

I'm trawling through a whole chunk of quality feeds at the moment and a couple of intelligent posts about Facebook caught my eye. Here they are:

• Downside of the web's 'social soup' - Andrew Smith writes about a piece from the BBC's Bill Thompson which looks at whether Facebook is becoming the web's "first true portal"
• Facebook as a game - Ian Delaney points out that social web tools are essentially games, looks at the rules on Facebook and predicts the next steps for the platform.

At the same time I came across an article where LinkedIn's CEO, Dan Nye, claims that in the future:

"people will maintain two social networking profiles and that LinkedIn will dominate as the professional social network."

It'll be interesting to see where this prediction goes. Personally I'm not convinced of the real benefits of LinkedIn but know that others find it invaluable.

I suppose it's ultimately down to what works for specific individuals or purposes. Until the social networking space consolidates we won't know either way.

Technorati tags: Facebook; Andrew+Smith; Ian+Delaney; twopointouch; LinkedIn

Comments

[Janet Clarey]

You may want to take a look at Danah Boyd's essay on class division (myspace vs. facebook) Although her research focuses on teen behavior (specifically American here) it raises some interesting opportunities for discussion about diversity.
http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/06/24/viewing_america.html

[Simon Collister]

Thanks, Janet. One of my colleague's pointed that out to me today. It's very interesting indeed and seems to match some analysis by Hitwise's Heather Hopkins. She found that Facebook users were more likely to vote compared to MySpacers. I'll blog about this shortly and post the links.