Facebook’s Killer Feature Coming Soon
Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 29th, 2007 11:30 AMBack in August I suggested that if Facebook allowed you to place your friends in specific groups (e.g. professional, social, family, etc) and assign custom privacy settings, LinkedIn would be doomed. While Facebook is going to have to work toward putting an end to LinkedIn, they have announced their intention to launch this new feature. Facebook states:
We’ll let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.
As Alexey Komissarouk told me: it doesn’t get more official then that. This is a highly anticipated feature. A number of people posted comments on my article stating that this was a critical feature that Facebook should release in the near future. I couldn’t agree more and fortunately, it looks like they are listening. Are you going to stop using LinkedIn when this new feature comes out?
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Whilst grouping will be useful for facebook, where i live, in the UK, I can see this being used to group those people who you actually know (groups of true deep friendships or a group of casual acquaintances) versus those that just want to be your "friend" although you have never met them and probably never will (myspace behaviour)
Also I see a lot of activity on facebook really geared towards showing off and seeing who can show to be the most outrageous person or cool person or who drank the most. I dont think that this activity works too well for serious business networking.
Mike
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Fixing that mistake is going to be a lot harder than just adding a new feature.
As far as LinkedIn, the reality is that Facebook has a big tech following but most people in other business areas don’t take it too seriously. It’s the equivalent of MySpace in that they see it as more of a kid’s toy. LinkedIn on the other hand has a reputation as a network for making business connections and I think that marketing advantage will be enough to keep them alive for years to come.
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As for getting rid of my LinkedIn profile. I wouldn't be so quick to do that as I do get business leads from it and I'm all about networking in as many places as I can when it comes to driving more business my way or to my friends for those leads that I’m not interested in.
I'm looking forward to seeing this new FB feature!
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Facebook is for fun.
That's not going to change, even with categories. And LinkedIn can add categories as well. It's not that big a deal.
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Honestly, I think they can do this without significantly impacting the user experience on the site.
Mike, someone has already made an application so that you can export your Facebook contacts and sync them with outlook:
http://apps.facebook.com/apps/application.php?i...
While it isn't fully featured it definitely comes close. There is no way that people are going to run to another social network if Facebook allows you to export your contacts. Sorry!
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Inner Circle moves in the right direction, but the sort of power that grouping friends requires, taking into account the privacy settings requirements, can only realistically be implemented by Facebook itself.
Looking forward to it :)
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Tagging, please. Please.
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I wonder what will become of applications like this one with Facebook reimplementing everyones features.
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For students in facebook, very high percentage will not use the tool to separate business contacts.. most of them will use to separate their friends into different categories.
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Various social networks have some common and some unique FEATURES, but that's not what makes them special, it's the USERS that matter far more.
The top three social networks these days all started with different type of core user. They represent a very diverse spectrum of web users:
LinkedIn was for professionals, Facebook was for college students, and MySpace was for bands, teens, and perverts.
As others have noted, simply adding one or two new features to any of them isn't going to change the culture and stigma of a social network.
That said, it's a nice feature and is certainly can't hurt. I don't foresee any kind of "backlash" against this type of feature, unlike the News Feeds (although that backlash seems to have fizzled a couple months later)
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But asking me if that would make me "switch" to Facebook from LinkedIn is like asking me if I would switch from BNI to the Chamber of Commerce if the Chamber started having weekly meetings, or if I'd stop visiting my favorite Mexican restaurant because my favorite Italian restaurant starts serving Mexican food. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose they're all competing for our attention, but it's still the people, not the technology, that provide the most value, and I see absolutely no compelling reason to devote all of my attention in one place.
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