‘Grown up’ social networking

There is a good piece in silicon.com today about LinkedIn, and how their CEO believes that it is very different to Facebook and the other social networking sites.

I agree, and somewhat bizarrely disagree completely.

I’m very much in tune with LinkedIn’s CEO and his thinking about LinkedIn’s role and ‘reason for being’. In fact I really struggle to understand why B2B professionals would not want to use the service – truth be told I am amazed it’s free.

But to assign other social networking sites into a ‘juvenile’ camp is naive. Maybe it is just semantics, and I am reading too much into it?

Take Twitter for instance. Over the last few days I have been following various people as they post comments (tweets) in real-time about events at SXSW (a music, film, and interactive conference and festival) particularly the uncomfortable keynote with Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO) and Business Week’s Sarah Lacy.

Hilarious. Live. Connected. Interactive. And certainly not juvenile.

Ok. Possibly not as thought-provoking or grammatically sound as a blog or elements of LinkedIn (e.g. Answers) but as a forum to share a stream-of-conscious babblings. Ideal.

Now the blogosphere is catching up on the whole Zuckerberg thang- with more detailed descriptions and reviews. But ultimately I learnt a great lesson in my use of Twitter over the last 48hrs. Its sufficiently different. Spectacularly different. And if you follow the appropriate people – seriously grown up.

Just like LinkedIn. Only different.

By the way I am here if you want to connect My LinkedIn Profile, My Twitter

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