There should be a new kid in town in terms of both social and professional networking sites.
I will go out on a limb and suggest that Facebook needs the one voyeuristic feature that LinkedIn has: the ability to see who has viewed your profile and vice versa.
We already have no reasonable expectation of privacy online—whether at work, home or on Facebook or LinkedIn. It is just the way things have evolved with our mainstream use of the Internet.
Another thing I will suggest—and this will be pleasing to conspiracy theorists, is that the high numbers of bogus law enforcement profiles/accounts generated on Facebook for the purposes of surveillance, and the great influence of the agencies behind these accounts, will forever prevent this feature of “viewing who’s viewed you,” from ever coming to Facebook.
I will grant you that it could be easily enough accomplished, though.
Concerns with the “man” monitoring you aside, the great sell-off of our personal information to companies wishing to pay for its incorporation into their marketing databases, would not be nearly the revenue stream for Facebook that it is, if we could see who has been watching us.
This is all alright by me. After all, Facebook is free. We surrender our expectation of privacy and handling of our personal information when we sign up for it. Essentially, we are letting them ride herd over anything we put on our Facebook pages. Again, it is a free service and we basically agree to whatever formats, rules and privacy policy changes that evolve, in return for our chance to freely “share.”
I understand all this, and I am OK with it all.
What is comical to me, personally, is every so often one of my Facebook friends will ask me to help them preserve their privacy by adjusting certain settings or clicking on some privacy feature and making a few changes.
If we genuinely are concerned with our privacy we would not be on Facebook in the first place.
Back at the ranch that is LinkedIn…
LinkedIn’s designers had the brilliant notion of permitting you the ability to see who has checked out your profile.
This is a killer feature whether you think (like me) it is a bit voyeuristic or not.
The fact you can pay for a premium account and see the full list of who has been scoping you is just insanely brilliant marketing strategy as far as I am concerned.
It is the perfect teaser.
Every time I sign in to LinkedIn, the siren’s call of the paid premium account that lets me view all who have viewed me, beckons.
I find it difficult to resist. But I have so far.
You checking me out?
Nice.
Maybe I will check you out now.
Or not.
Thanks for looking at me, though.
And so it goes…
This limited taste of who has been viewing your LinkedIn profile leaves you thirsting for more.
It is only natural to want to see the others looking at you.
Dating sites are largely built on these principles of viewing other people’s profiles and they in turn viewing yours—you can see all of them and vice versa! This hopefully enables you to make the right choices when it comes to potential dates.
Now LinkedIn is obviously not a dating site.
But it has THE feature that makes dating sites popular and successful.
Facebook, ironically enough, will not ever have it unless their executive team loses its minds.
There is a niche combining the best of both worlds that some savvy entrepreneur should take advantage of:
FinkedIn or Linkbook?
Which of these two services would show the most promise (and profit)?