Content Matters

Can business users get value from Facebook?

That's a question that I've seen & heard from a number of sources in recent weeks.  As Fred Wilson twittered this morning, its the same question he had about LinkedIn in the early days, but now gets value from it. 

So, what does Facebook have to do to create value for business users?  Here are a few thoughts:

First, it needs to provide the tools to support business relationships.  Today, the only business relationship they support is "worked together" (or I guess "hooked up" may apply to the workplace, but I'm not going to go there).  Business relationships can be much more complex.  We should be able to reflect relationships like client:vendor, investor:portfolio company, biz dev partners and more.

Next, Facebook should allow its users to set a sharing threshold of "friendship".  There may be details that I'd share with "friends" but not with business colleagues.  I'd like the ability, when I add a friend, to categorize them as a friend, a colleague or an acquaintance.  Then, when I add apps to my profile, I'd like to flag them to whether they'll be shared with each category of friends.  That helps me separate business apps from personal apps, while still keeping them all in one place.

Once a framework like this is put in place, it will support business applications.  It would be simple, for example, to provide "degree of separation" relationships like LinkedIn offers. 

So, why do we need to build that in Facebook, if LinkedIn already offers it?

Facebook provides things that LinkedIn cannot easily match.  With the open platform, it's reasonable to expect industry-specific networking applications to emerge.  There are attributes of relationships which differ from industry to industry.  For example, a lobbyist might want to have a party attached to each of her contacts.  Horizontal apps could also be easily built for recruitment, reference checking, business development and more.

As a platform, Facebook is well-suited to replace the "home pages" most people use today such as my.yahoo.  I can pop an RSS reader into Facebook, so I can read all of my RSS feeds off that page.  I can integrate a calendar and address book (which should be able to synch with my corporate (Exchange) files and my Blackberry.  I can also access it from a mobile device, without having to fumble through sites that don't work well on the mobile. 

So, eight weeks after the platform was announced, it's clear that Facebook has not yet transformed itself into a business networking application.  But with a few enhancements to the core platform, and a bunch of creative developers using the platform, I'd bet it's there by next spring or summer.