Most of the comments and trackbacks from my post on LinkedIn confirmed that LinkedIn has momentum as a business social network. However some Facebook fans believe that LinkedIn is only enjoying a temporary time in the sun.
For example Stowe Boyd, a man who knows a thing or two about social media, had this to say:
“Bernard Lunn thinks LinkedIn is in a great spot because 80% of his
contacts are there, and Facebook isn’t real for business yet. Wait six
months, Bernard.”
I am not sure what Stowe is predicting in six months. However I am
interested in prediction markets, so how about we define a specific
prediction and then revisit it in six months? If Facebook and/or LinkedIn were public companies, we could test our
predictive powers in the stock market with real money. However because they are
private companies (for now), we can just do this for fun and bragging rights. Anyway public companies are now all boring, predictable enterprises; we have to recreate the fun in the private markets.
So the prediction, we think, from Stowe is this:
“In 6 months Facebook will have more of your business contacts than LinkedIn”.
We’ll check back in 6 months whether that prediction comes true. But for now we’ll run a poll to see whether RWW readers think LinkedIn can hold off the Facebook challenge in business networking. Please take a moment to vote in this poll:
