Facebook Vs. LinkedIn

Facebook mania is currently sweeping the Valley right now. There's not a day when most of the tech blogs I am reading have something about Facebook.

I have been on LinkedIn much longer than Facebook. I started out using LinkedIn as my professional networking tool and FaceBook as a way to keep in touch with my friends from school.

But in the last few weeks I have found myself almost exclusively checking my Facebook page. To me, it has become much more exciting and useful than LinkedIn and here's why:

--LinkedIn feels like Web 1.0 and by that I mean a fairly static website with not enough interactivity between the user and the site. When I log into my LinkedIn page all I see is one kind of notification: Someone on my contact list has added a new connections. Every once in a while I will see questions posed by users but that's about it. No updates about their status, what they are upto, what they might be working on etc. That makes LinkedIn very boring. Most of my LinkedIn page is static, so it that of my friends. People don't change jobs for years and so I see no reason to visit their pages after a while. I am begining to find the whole introduction process to get linked with another person also very cumbersome. LinkedIn forces me bring up an email client to send emails to friends on that list. In Facebook I can do it all on the site itself.

--Lack of applications on LinkedIn.
Facebook has turned itself into a platform that allows developers to create new applications for the site. And I, like most of Facebook's users, have been having fun with that. I can applications like cities I have visited or play scrable or embed video--all of which keeps me interested and involved with the site.
On LinkedIn other than ask a question there's not much for me to see or do.

--Boring and predictable.
Surprise me LinkedIn! LinkedIn could do a few fun things once in a while to keep users interested. For instance, it could hand out five InMail introductions randomly every few months.That would get me excited and I could spend hours on the site looking for the five people I want to spend my precious InMail introductions on. I am sure the marketing team at LinkedIn can think of fun ideas like this.

LinkedIn has positioned itself as a business networking tool but business networking is about connecting with people and building relationships with them. I feel I am able to build those relationships when I get a sense of what the people looks like, what his or her passions here and get a better idea of the person behind the web profile. That's what Facebook gives me.

Facebook is no longer about just college students. Heck, the CEO and CFO of my company are on it!

LinkedIn has stopped innovating. It needs to bring some exciting new features in or I am completely moving to Facebook.