

Why Google Should Buy LinkedIn, Now Before It's Too Late - sinzone
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/03/businessinsider-why-google-should-buy-linkedin-2011-5.DTL

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wcgortel
To me, "winning" in social sounds a lot like "winning" the war on drugs. It's
a struggle for a concept, not a tangible objective.

Like most hyped tech, there's genuine value to social strategy. However,
Google's core business - providing an information index - will be valuable
with or without one.

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lawnchair_larry
It is unclear why one would want to encourage more monopolies on networking
and identity data. Let's keep those separate.

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erez
I was kinda wondering about the "too late", turns out it means "before they go
public", which is too late in the "more expensive, less control" meaning.

As for the "should", they really don't. They could launch they're own
LinkedIn-like service, or buy them, or do a different social network, or not.
The article keeps hammering that Google have to "win in social". They don't,
because, unlike search, there is no, currently, a good way to secure a major
share of the market, which is what I'm guessing they mean by "win", because
"social" is a bubble, not a real market.

This bubble will burst, sooner or later, and the less Google blows on
"social", the better they'll come out of it.

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ThomPete
Yes the bubble will burst. Just like the dot com bubble did. That does not
mean that dot com is is dead.

I am not sure but I do think that Google has to at least make some sort of
dent in the curation space.

Personally I am using google less and less because I end up with search
results that are based on how well google was gamed rather than on the value
of the content.

It's very hard to do algorithmic work that can't be gamed and thus the
question at least to me is whether curation by humans will end up winning over
recommendation by machines.

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erez
Google's already _in_ that space, they are so ubiquitous with almost anything.
Take Google analytics, that's in probably 50% of the web. Google search is
default in any browser that is not IE. Take gmail, Google calendar, Google
docs, the level of human interaction that is made through their servers is
second to none. They just don't have a major stake in "social", but they do,
through search, through crawling, etc. And with the current privacy and
sharing status (that is, lack of), they have a lot of access to a lot of user
details.

The only thing a social network has over Google is the ability to perform
application-level data cross-referencing, and Google wants a hold in that.
Probably before the bubble bursts and those details get lost, or sold, or
leaked, or whatever.

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ThomPete
The problem is that the qualification of search results are not based on human
interaction or curation but on optimizing for google accessibility. That
creates a very very different landscape.

It's not the details that's important it's the sentiment and opinion around
the details that's important and that google haven't solved yet.

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edanm
Interesting. LinkedIn and Google actually seem like a good fit, now that I
think about it:

Facebook = Fun

Google = Work/education/information

LinkedIn = Work

These are obviously generalizations, but they hold up. After all, I'd be
pretty upset if Google ever bought Facebook. But Google buying LinkedIn? It
makes me think "yeah, sure, that's an excellent way to make LinkedIn even
better for me".

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Tichy
Isn't LinkedIn rather in the category of MySpace, that is, social networks of
the past?

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smackfu
It's just a parallel social network.

OTOH, if Facebook chose to, they could really hurt LinkedIn by leveraging
their existing network. Just expand the jobs part of the profile to support
resumes and such, add support for job relationships similar to family
relationships, and provide default privacy settings for "colleagues" rather
than "friends". Sell access to a back-end search limited to the jobs section,
and LinkedIn starts running scared.

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Aloisius
I hear this a lot and in my opinion, a sizable minority of people can't mix
their social and professional networks together. I can't have my business
clients see who I'm currently dating or pictures from my nephew's bar mitzvah.
Not only is it unprofessional, but it can harm my future dealings with them.

I know a lot of people have on Facebook have accepted invites from their boss
or professional contacts and they stop participating in it as a social network
and start using it as a glorified email/im system. If everyone did this, it
would harm Facebook's ecosystem in the long run.

Even with privacy controls and grouping people together, keeping mental
context about who can see what at any given time is just too hard for most
people. Seeing facebook.com and thinking social and linkedin.com and thinking
professional is far easier.

* Disclaimer - I used to work for LinkedIn in analytics as a product manager and did a lot of user interviews, but I may have drank the kool-aid.

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ignifero
That would make a lot of sense. Both companies hold similar contact data
(GMail contacts vs LinkedIn). There are many similar use cases between the
two. Is this just speculation?

