From the Twitterwire comes news from TechCrunch that LinkedIn is cutting it’s staff by 10%. Sure, they’re reassigning roles and just got a new round of funding. So today’s story doesn’t put the company on death watch.
The announcement’s timing is ironic to me, though, because just today I took another look at LinkedIn after a nudge from the company announcing its applications feature. Today’s completed LinkedIn task: adding my picture. So now, according to LinkedIn, my profile is 100% complete. With a complete profile I brace for the rush of activity and new life that LinkedIn will bring my life above and beyond what Facebook already does. Funny, my inbox is still quiet.
In theory the idea of a “professional” social network makes sense. We should all have a non-Myspace place to congregate and socialize amongnst colleagues. The only problem for LinkedIn is that we already have one and it’s called Facebook. For the life of me I can’t see how LinkedIn is going to make itself into a business. (Disclaimer: Facebook admits it doesn’t know how to either)
They both have time to figure it out but Facebook has the upper hand. If it figures out its business model it can tap into a user base much larger than LinkedIn (100m vs 29m). Further, since most of LinkedIn’s users are also on Facebook, the simple strategic move for Facebook would be to convince its mutual users to stop using LinkedIn.
Facebook offers flexibility. You can use it as a personal hub as well as a professional hub. With the never ending stream of applications and features, Facebook does for you what you want it to do. No more no less. At this point you can’t use it as a resume which is about the only use I can find for LinkedIn. With LinkedIn’s new application feature, perhaps they will slowly become more than a fancy resume company/less-trashy monster.com and more of a digital hub. Only time will tell. Until then, I think it’s a stretch to refer to LinkedIn as a “social network.”
