The Effective CIO

I’ve written at length on the usefulness of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, and various other social tools. Each serves a unique role in creating a complete online social presence.  Professional network? LinkedIn.  Personal network? Facebook. Address book? Plaxo. Real-time status? Twitter.  This is not hard to understand for the millions of users of these systems. We all seem happy to use each tool as it fits our world, some more, some less.

Except for Twitter, the purveyors of these tools are not happy with our usage model.  They seem to think that we are not using them enough, and they keep making changes to draw us closer to their platform.  So far, this has not worked, and the tools are getting worse instead of better.

Most recently, LinkedIn announced that they had integrated Twitter capabilities into their interface. Really?  I find it hard to believe that this was the most requested LinkedIn feature.  Was LinkedIn barraged on a daily basis with demands that people’s Twitter streams suddenly appear in their LinkedIn profile?

I doubt it.  LinkedIn has no ability to present a status stream like Twitter.  The idea is completely out of touch with the LinkedIn model. The real-time, transient nature of tweets clashes with the professional, managed appearance of LinkedIn’s profile.  It’s like showing up to a job interview in your pajamas.

Instead, I sense a panicked decision among a management team whose product is losing relevance to a more dominant technology.  If you can’t beat ‘em, integrate them poorly, I guess.

What does LinkedIn offer?  They list your Twitter account in your profile and allow you to stream some or all of your tweets into your LinkedIn status.  To selectively send tweets to your profile status, you must include the hashtag #in in the tweet.  This serves two purposes: it lets LinkedIn grab and post the tweet, and it lets everyone on Twitter know that you don’t know the difference between Twitter and LinkedIn. LinkedIn might as well grab and post #fail tweets to complete your social portrait.

Facebook is suffering from a similar case of Twitter-envy, but is doing a better job of hiding it.  You can connect your Twitter and Facebook statuses so that all your tweets show up as Facebook status updates.  I do this, more as a time saver than anything else, although I occasionally update Facebook independently from Twitter.

Given the similar functionality between Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets, that integration is easy.  Unfortunately, Facebook also envies Twitter’s real-time nature and has developed multiple conflicting ways to look at status updates.  Within Facebook, I can look at status updates.  I can also look at my news feed and it’s close sibling, the live news feed.  As best I can tell, the live news feed provides a more intimate view of the activity on Farmville and Mafia Wars but little else.

When I do check Facebook, I tend to check all of these things, plus my wall and my inbox, just in case.  No wonder Facebook claims to present one-fourth of all pageviews on the internet: it takes that many just to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

There’s a lesson here: stick to what you know.  LinkedIn’s Twitter integration is just embarrassing for all concerned.  Facebook’s Twitter envy is damaging a once-clean user interface. If these platforms would be happy with what they do best, we’d all be better off. And if we all applied that rule to everything we do, imagine how much good we’d accomplish.