Andrew McAfee recently added to the Serena Facebook-As-Intranet case study. Which prompted an SNS review thang in my head.
I still have issues with Facebook. I think it's a bit of a mess and doesn't give enough control to the individual in terms of identity management. 80 million active users (according to Facebook) would disagree. However it is still a trail-blazer in terms of application development (even if most of them are really annoying).
LinkedIn has 24 million members (according to LinkedIn). If anything, LinkedIn is not messy enough. The Q&A functionality is nice. LinkedIn is the kind of social networking tool you could introduce to your mother (after your rebellious phase of wearing a leather jacket and hanging out with MySpace). As I once got a job via LinkedIn, I can't really complain but there is so much missing from here - e.g. some network visualisation stuff would be cool. LinkedIn seem to know this and have added status updates and some feed integration. But no one would make LinkedIn their intranet.
Plaxo is surprising me. After it gained an uneviable reputation as a spam machine a few years back, I went back in there a few weeks ago to be confronted with LinkedIn's cooler cousin. The design is smooth and spare. And the Pulse page pulls together your connections' blogs, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. Again - a bit lacking on the visualisation front.
I think it takes a particular kind of organisation to have Facebook as their intranet. However there are an increasing number of organisations creating SNS applications within the firewall. Over the next 12 months, we're definitely going to see links between these internal applications and the external ones listed above. And that's without mentioning the acquistion of VisiblePath by Hoovers....
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Having been put off Plaxo originally I too am beginning to appreciate it. Especially the ability to keep contacts details up to date across various systems.
I find LinkedIn somewhat useful as well. Though I agree it seems to be lacking. What I find is an issue with many of these social networks is that they are centred on the person. That may sound like a strange statement - social media and all, but in business most of us actually interact with people because of their role, not who they are.
Check out my post at Linking Local http://blog.wikidomo.com/2008/07/social-media-in.html
Linkedin is really taking off, they just made About.com's top 10 employement site list too. (alphabetical order)
http://www.careerbuilder.com
http://www.craigslist.com
http://www.hotjobs.com
http://www.jobfox.com
http://www.indeed.com
http://www.linkedin.com
http://www.monster.com
http://www.realmatch.com
http://www.simplyhired.com
linkedin.com and a site called Realmatch.com are the 2 newest additions.
http://jobsearch.about.com/od/joblistings/tp/jobbanks.htm
hey Matt.
Facebook is beginning to bother me more and more. I like it when it's functional, but if Plaxo continues to improve I'm even thinking of ditching FB altogether. Or at least only use it for friends who don't use other forms of social media. There is the "need to know" and "nice to know" but unfortunately the "I didn't really want to know that" creeps into FB when people don't really understand how to modify their profile settings - as you point out.
LinkedIn has been better now that they made some improvements and I paid it some attention. As ePredator often says, the more you put into web2.0 the more you get out of it.
I have a feeling that Facebook Connect may well be a game changer. Especially because that's where all my friends already are hanging out (even under protest).
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