I’ve been ‘LinkedIn’ for several months now.  I’ve made contacts with enough of my current and past colleagues to feel like its useful.  I’ve also gotten several serious employment inquiries.  I am a firm believer in the whole ‘web networking’ thing.  When you replace the ‘web’ with ’social’ in that statement is where I get a little sketchy – at least when talking about professional relationships. 

There are blog posts out the wazoo talking about FaceBook burying sites like myspace and LinkedIn.  I am certainly not bashing FaceBook because I’m not much of a user – it seems like it has a nicely designed web interface and certainly is getting a lot of pub so they must be doing something right.  I just don’t get the hype from the perspective of saying it will ‘replace’ sites like LinkedIn.  When I created my FaceBook account and started trying to connect to contacts I felt like I was in a dating service.  Maybe its more of a general issue with society, but the pictures of people are almost always in a party mode and most of the people seem to me to be in more of a ’social mood’ in their profiles and comments.  Maybe I’m just turning into an old guy, but it just seems like the purpose is different, whether the creators intended it to be different or not.  Maybe the new wave is to totally mashup your personal and professional life.  I’m not sure I’m down with that though… that’ll take some getting used to. 

So, again I’m not saying use LinkedIn  over Facebook.  I’m looking for someone to convince me that I should invest the time into FaceBook for professional endeavors.  So… let me have it.