Tom and James have been writing about LinkedIn and Facebook. Both are social networking tools. Tom reckons LinkedIn is Toast. James reckons we have too many of these sites.
I’m a big fan of LinkedIn for business networking and I don’t think it’s going to die just yet.
- LinkedIn does one thing (manage your business network) and one thing well.
- Facebook tries to do too much – it tries find everybody that I have ever interacted with, and list them as part of my network. I think the ‘look aren’t we cool for being online‘ thing is a little bit 1998.
- Anybody that I link to on linked in (a) I have met and (b) I would recommend to a friend. Facebook is more like those people that list everybody they have got a business card from at a long forgotten networking event.
- As a developer , an API is great and I’m glad LinkedIn is opening up (albeit under pressure from Facebook and others). 9 months is a long time to wait, but the ‘data is Intel inside’ means that it’s not worth me trying to pull my network over to another site just yet.
If you’ve already met me and want to connect, check out my LinkedIn profile. Scott Allen has more on the LinkedIn API. Pairup is a powerful site showing the value of the API – just enter your travel/event details, and pairup will suggest who in your LinkedIn network (and friends-of-friends) that you can connect with.
Paul Browne 
Re-reading my post I realize I didn’t make my point clearly but it’s not so much that I think we’ve too many social networks, more that without RSS feeds they are unmanageable IMHO. And that’s where Facebook is a big letdown at the moment, though, as Gareth Stack points out in the comments they do provide feeds for certain aspects of the service. Just not the aggregate.
I definitely agree with you Paul as regards LinkedIn – I don’t think Facebook replaces it yet in terms of how it manages your business networks either.
Stewart Rogers has a post on his blog explaining in more detail how to use LinkedIn and PairUp together.
Thanks for the link, James.
Oops — sorry — I meant thanks for the link, Paul! 🙂
That’s ok Scott – I’ve been called much worse 🙂
“I’ve been called much worse”
I should bloody well hope so! 😉
James
The only thing worse than being talked about is *not* being talked about!
Paul
If your interested in an irish business social network, check out http://create.investnet.ie
We have been developing it for the last 6 months and we finally have it out in the public for our client Investnet.
Its early days but with investnets event planning mixed with this I think they could do quite well in the irish market.
Derek,
It’s an impressive site – and that’s coming from somebody who builds these for a living 🙂
Filled in all the details, when it reminded me that I already had signed up (I think you or somebody at Investnet may have let me look at the preview – I also do a bit of presenting for them at Invent in DCU)
Anyway, if you’re at OpenCoffee tomorrow morning, will (finally) talk to you then!
Paul