Consider this bit from blogger Seth Goldstein:
It is as if in a matter of months, both the high end of LinkedIn and the high-end of MySpace had been absorbed into the Facebook social graph. LinkedIn is suddenly no longer the social network of choice for us chic geeks. Yes, we learned how to tell our professional stories these past few years in the LinkedIn profile fields, but- as in summer of our 8th grade- we are now ready to lose the awkward friends we had accumulated , and start from scratch in a new environment.
Meanwhile, the kids who treated their MySpace profile, and concomitant friend requests, with the same reckless abandon that we have done with our LinkedIn profiles, have now de-camped for Facebook.
Is it just me, or is there a strange similarity between all these social networking sites and say, areas of a city that get hot with all sorts of bars and nightclubs and then go cold in a matter of months? I mean, Friendster was huge, then it wasn’t. LinkedIn got big, MySpace got big, and now Facebook seems to be getting big. Someday, Facebook will be cold, too. Just like neighborhoods or nightclubs.
LinkedIn is just now taking off big time in the ad community.
I suspect that its appeal to ad geeks has everything to do with the fact that it’s *not* social. All you need to do is list your past few jobs. No favorite songs. No leaving comments.
So I don’t see FaceBook or similar gaining the same kind of traction there. LinkedIn is too easy and too adult. And keeps the line between your professional life and personal life firmly in place.
That said, I think you’re 100% correct in terms of the uber-geek crowd your friend Seth mentions: they will flit from networking site to networking site the way hipsters flit from neighborhood to neighborhood, cool bar to cool bar. And they flee for precisely the same reasons the geeks do: the place is getting too popular, too many of the “wrong” people are there, there’s no cool factor in knowing about it.
Good call.
While the “average user” on MySpace may be moving to Facebook, you know who’s not migrating? Bands. For bands and their fans MySpace is the space.
it’s more about purpose or godforbid an actual USP. MySpace and Facebook are now the same thing. Face traded its USP (college kids only) for the short cash boost of “everybody”. That’s what killed Friendster and what’s slowly causing FB to level off.
LinkedIn isn’t for finding hot dates, the latest bands, cockteasing 17 yr olds, or having some psuedo cache, etc. It’s for businessfolks looking to expand their circle of business opps. Period. it’s not really set up to be anything else.
If they’re smart they’ll remember that and never go beyond that.
Facebook’s already tossed its one point of difference out the window. Now they’re in the same boat as everyone else–“how do we differentiate ourselves?”
stay tuned for the crash.