LinkedIn to FaceBook

Very interesting article on the excellent MarketClusters today about the competition between FaceBook and LinkedIn. As a user of both, I can see great advantages of "linking" the two. I'm afraid that if pressed, FaceBook would win. Can't see my daughters on LinkedIn. Whereas most of my business friends seem to be on FaceBook as well as LinkedIn.

LinkedIn follows Facebook's example

[MarketClusters - 24 Jun 2007 09:38 BST]
LinkedIn is opening up its platform to third party developers within the next nine months, following the example of social network Facebook, which recently claimed it attracted 40,000 developers in the first month since it opened up its platform. According to Dan Farber of ZDNet, LinkedIn CEO says LinkedIn would deliver APIs for developers: "Ostensibly to make it more of a platform like Facebook, and create a way for users who spend more time socially in Facebook to get LinkedIn notifications."
The move comes as Facebook, which claims more than 26m users globally, is seen as an increasing threat to more specialised social networks, such as the more business-focused LinkedIn, which has about 11m users. While some argue that specialised social networks will ultimately be more successful than general ones, Facebook allows users to decide how much of their profile is available to others depending on their relationship with them, for instance whether they are business contacts, close friends, or family. Extending this further, by allowing users to create different profiles altogether based on relationship type, would further put pressure on niche networks. Reid Hoffman, founder and chairman of California-based LinkedIn, and Silicon Valley angel Peter Thiel, both back LinkedIn as well as Facebook.