One network to rule them all

Recent claims by LinkedIn that the site will "own business networking" (TheBrowser) strike me as interesting, if only because I've recently linked up with so many professional contacts on Facebook. I use Facebook a lot because it's versatile and my friends (and, increasingly, business contacts) are on there. I use LinkedIn very little because, as I've said before, it doesn't really do anything.

The argument that "people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life" because it's "not good to have a prospective employer stumble on to those photos of you freshman year in Delta Kappa Epsilon" would hold more water if it was Facebook rather than Google that prospective employers were likely to search for those pictures. (Who links to prospective employers from their social network anyway? It's hardly usual to walk out of an interview thinking "I can see myself working for her, I'd better friend her when I get home".)

Businesses like ReputationDefender and Garlik exist precisely to solve the problem of being Googled by prospective employers. Perhaps there's room for consolidation here, and there's clearly room for network aggregation (TechCrunch). However, the idea that people somehow need a special work network because that will keep their private lives secret from their colleagues is not merely digital immigrant pre-web2.0 thinking but pre-search thinking.