Are you on LinkedIn or Facebook?
July 17th, 2008 Posted in Uncategorized
I finally understand at least part of the usefulness of Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites. The biggest value (for me) in using a service like this is for its usefulness as a self-updating contact manager.
I was looking at my contacts that I’ve made on LinkedIn today, and I noticed that a couple of people that I know have changed jobs. If I just had a normal address book on my computer or phone, I would have to manually go and change their contact information every time that happened. But because I use this social networking service as my contact list, my contacts change their own information, taking the responsibility off of me. LinkedIn is a site built around your work life, and using it as a contact manager is both simple and brilliant.
Facebook not only provides a way to be useful as a contact manager, but provides a single portal to keep up on the lives of your non-work related acquaintances (I think they’re called ‘friends’). As you and your friends begin to funnel more and more of your activities into Facebook (something that I’ve been using FriendFeed to accomplish, and I’ve been loving the fact that it all happens automatically), you find that you now have a single portal to keep up on the lives of the people you care about. The more that you and your friends use the service, the more valuable and useful it becomes.
The problem in the past has been that there were so many competing social networks, it was difficult to decide which one(s) to get involved with. Now that we have pretty clear winners with Facebook (for friends) and LinkedIn (for business), these networks are becoming exponentially more useful and valuable.
So the question now becomes: Do YOU have a Facebook or LinkedIn account? If so, please add me as a contact. If not, how about you take a couple minutes to create a profile, and then let me know about it?! 
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