Are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Converging?

[Updated 24 March 2009 with link to Interfolio, "credential, dossier and online portfolio service."]

[Updated 23 March 2009 with link to Andrew Careaga's post that brings newspapers and journalism into this thread.]

I recently mentioned in one of my online status updates that my personal and professional networks seem to be converging online. (Did I mention this on Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? I can't remember...and that's sort of the point.) 

Specifically, a large majority of people I know are active on Facebook and/or LinkedIn. Facebook started out as my "personal" network and LinkedIn started out as my "professional" network. I'd find someone from high school on Facebook. Panelists at a conference would find me on LinkedIn. This was neat and easy.

Now, it's a big jumble. LinkedIn suggests that you "may know" your spouse and recommends you connect with him to grow your network. Facebook tells you...well Facebook tells you that someone you know took a dumb quiz. And now Twitter tells us what LinkedIn and Facebook are telling our contacts to tell us. 

So are these services overlapping, are they simply connected, or are they converging? Will we end up with a single place to connect with people and share "updates," or will the sites' functionality continue on more or less parallel paths? 

When I asked this in a status update last week, I received a few interesting reactions:

Charlie O'Donnell from recently-launched career site Path101, wrote about behavior and experience: 

Behavior on these networks is vastly different. I could have all the same contacts in each (which I purposely do not) and they wouldn't be anywhere near the same experiences. Facebook has so many more ways to communicate...Messages, wall posts, pokes, comments...It's "live". Facebook is the quad, while LinkedIn is the rolodex that sits on my desk. LinkedIn is not an engaging, social place. It is an effective tool. What will prevent LinkedIn from becoming more social and more communicative is that throttling and controlling communication is how they make money.

Sherry Main (who works at the University of California–Irvine) mentioned the portfolio approach to marketing oneself. Profiles on network sites are not enough anymore:  

I'd throw in a VisualCV type of tool in too. Particularly since college graduates are coming out with all kinds of portfolios these days, ranging from dance majors to computer science majors.

And Princeton's Andrew Gossen made several related points (including a similar one about portfolios; see Interfolio for another example of this service). Among them:

• LinkedIn will become more like Facebook; not the other way around. 
• Profiles should appear one way to personal friends and another way to actual and prospective professional contacts and the filtering process should be automated. Enter your info once, and have the system display what's relevant to different categories of people (after you've assigned them to a contact type). 
• Some way to sync evolving professional and personal networks with smartphones or PDAs would be incredibly valuable. 
• To a large extent, status updates are a game of one-upsmanship. But you'd brag very differently to a professional audience than to a personal audience. As the two types of networks converge, different channels for these two types of communication must evolve. 

These are great insights and ideas and bear watching. I personally believe we're moving toward the incorporation of network tools (including Twitter) into the OS or desktop; we won't need to "log in" to a site or service. The functions will be "always on" and therefore, so will the network.

What are your ideas or observations about the ways in which our networks are coalescing – or resisting integration? 

Leave a comment.

Photo of converging, connected lines via Creative Commons from Flickr user Bill Frazzetto.