Whatterz

Playing Devils Advocate to Facebook

by Simon. Average Reading Time: about a minute.

In a clear attempt to play devils-advocate, “Facebook is designed to suck up all your free time so that you become a slave to ‘the network’”. What we have yet to see is Facebook drip-feeding that free time back to you at a premium; it will happen!

Now, that’s fantastic if you don’t actually ever want to meet or verbalise with your so-called-friends ever again! But what if you do? You’re trapped in the spiral of needing to update your profile, poke someone, tag a picture and all the other things you can do on the site.

Ironically I have a Facebook profile, but on the premise that I wanted to check out the cool functionality (afterall I am a web developer by trade; honestly that is the reason). I am vehemently resisting its lure, but the black-hole is a powerful thing, especially if you use it for networking.

One commentator said that for LinkedIn to survive it needs to be more like Facebook; No! For LinkedIn to survive it needs to differentiate itself from Facebook and stay in the professional arena. I don’t want my not-so-many chums on Facebook to see my fellow geeks on LinkedIn, for me they are two entirely different groups.

This article has been tagged

, , , , , , ,

Other articles I recommend

Online Social Networks: Everywhere, Yet Nowhere

In the late 1990s, a large multi-national technology corporation, hoping to become a major force in online advertising, bought a small start-up in a sector that was believed to be the “next big thing”. That corporation was Microsoft and the start-up was Hotmail. Hotmail and Microsoft established web-based email as a must-have application for personal use. The addition of Hotmail to the Microsoft inventory promised to increase the companies online revenues that were being dominated by Yahoo!, Google and AOL amongst a host of others.

Tools to Help You Manage Your Facebook Account

With more than 400m registered users globally, Facebook is the world’s largest social network. If you’ve identified Facebook as the area of focus of your social media efforts, you should select a monitoring tool that’s strong in Facebook.

The Ten Commandments of Social Media

If you’ve ever wondered how to go about the whole social media thing, Lon Safko, author of the Social Media Bible suggests 10 commandments that go a long way to embracing the phenomenon.