Facebook is fighting the wrong battle

There has been much written of late suggesting Facebook wants to be the new Twitter. So I won't rehash it all here, if you're interested in what's been written, click here.

Suffice to say, the new Facebook interface is certainly designed to facilitate more real-time sharing and updating. And I guess you could say that is an attempt to mimic Twitter. But if that is Zucker's goal, I'd certainly encourage him to look left.

Facebook's bigger opp if you ask me is to attack LinkedIn. While LinkedIn is great as an online resume, it kind of sucks beyond that in terms of a true networking site. Sure they're letting link my Slideshare decks and my blog, and I can answer questions so I seem smart, but other than that, it just lacks really good networking tools. In fact, if I had a dollar for everytime I heard someone say, "So what do you think about LinkedIn? I have an account but I don't go there much." I could blog full-time!

Facebook is much better positioned to serve as an online destination for all things Tom. I can roll in my Tweets, my Slideshares, Flickr pics, videos of my talks, etc., etc. And now that FB is letting me filter my wall by lists, they have taken one of the two important steps they need to take to bring LinkedIn down. The second step is to let me tag my content by list. So my business lists only see my business tagged items. Of course, you have to worry about other folks tagging you on their stuff, but that is easily solved by just defaulting all content to "personal" lists. If I want to share anything with my Business List, I have to manually make that change myself. Problem solved.

If FB can figure out a way for me to create a Chinese Wall between my professional and personal contacts, they could in effect do away with my need for LinkedIn. And let's face it, who among you would not love to have one less Social Network to manage?

So to Facebook I say, don't fight the battle you can't win. You've already got me using you to manage my personal contacts, help me use you to manage my business contacts too.

What do y'all think? Anyone out there a LinkedIn heavy user? Chime in.

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