Now that Facebook has expanded beyond its college audience roots, the site is about to make a big push to capture a business audience as well.
The social networking site's "in the works"
section states that it will soon allow members to organize contacts into groups and then choose which groups see what information. Fortune and other publications have interpreted this change as
a direct challenge to LinkedIn because it will potentially let members create different profiles for business and social purposes. In other words, people will more easily be able to separate their
personal lives from their business identities on the same site.
"They've got to see this as a major threat," Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr toldFortune, referring to LinkedIn. "The open question that no one is really prepared
to answer yet is how many networks do you really want to belong to?"
And if the move raises the question of what will happen to LinkedIn, it also makes one wonder about the fate of
countless other social networking sites. Some might already be facing overload. Boomer-focused site Eons, for instance, recently restructured and laid off one-third of its staff.