Tamar Weinberg just wrote a great post about how she uses the big social media sites.  Since she asked for everyone’s opinion, I thought I would add my thoughts on the subject.  This is somewhat easier for me since I mostly ignore everything except Facebook and LinkedIn, i.e. no MySpace for me. 

I have a longstanding account on Stanford’s alumni network, InCircle (maybe this was this the first social networking site? I wonder).  It’s really useless.  I get emails from friends-of-friends-of-friends looking for apartments or programmers in NYC or the Bay Area.  In about 7 years of being signed up the only thing interesting was that one email came from a mutual friend of Sergey Brin (each email shows the path it took to find you).  2 seconds of “that’s kind of neat” was about all of the use I’ve had from that network.

Lately I’ve been getting requests for friends on Plaxo, which I have accepted as they are from colleagues, but I’m thinking Plaxo is pretty late to this party.  I also got one from Spock (an old friend) and signed up, but I’m not comfortable enough with Spock to give them the keys to my social networking kingdom, such as it is.

For both Facebook and LinkedIn, I think I have accepted everyone who friends me.  Since I’m not a famous blogger, I don’t really have a bunch of people I don’t know trying to friend me.  I do vet everyone, making sure that people I don’t know are at least credible (like Google, I won’t disclose the super secret algorithm I use in the vetting) and so far everyone has passed the test.  I guess I fall pretty close to Jason Calacanis’s thinking here, that rejecting friend requests really angers some people, so I’m better off keeping some of personal life off of the site and being more liberal with who I accept.  That said, any of my Facebook friends can see me dressed like the Beast from Beauty and Beast bearing my “claws” and looking pretty silly. 

Last thought, this one on LinkedIn.  I have a pretty extensive Outlook contacts list (growing for almost a decade).  As LinkedIn encourages, at one point I sent a link request to everyone in there.  Keep in mind these are all people I have met in person at some point.  A couple of people chose the “didn’t know” option which is like making an obscene gesture back to the requester.  It basically put a ban on my account.  Here is the tip of the day, if somebody sends you a LinkedIn request and you aren’t sure who they are, have the courtesy to ask them in a reply.  If they reply and you still don’t want to link to them, just ignore it.  And to the folks at LinkedIn, if 2 or 3 people out of hundreds say “don’t know” you may want to look at whether that really should trigger any kind of hold on an account.

My final thought is that though my LinkedIn list is older and much bigger, I find Facebook at least 10x more useful.   My friends and colleagues post pictures, send me messages,  and in general, interact with me as friends do.  LinkedIn just sits there.  Occasionally there is a request I can help someone with or one I put out asking for help.  But, it is much closer to the old Stanford network than Facebook, which feels alive to me.  I think if LinkedIn doesn’t replicate the most useful features of Facebook very quickly they will lose the business market to the network that is actually used by its members.

Photo credit:  Luc Legay