The Facebookization of LinkedIn

Last night Mark Hendrickson broke the news that LinkedIn would update their design. The new design heavily resembles Facebook’s design including the color scheme. There are some critical differences but for the most part, these changes reflect a shift toward the addition of features that have been native to Facebook since the beginning. LinkedIn will add status updates, more granular privacy settings and more prevalent group features.

So are LinkedIn and Facebook going to end up being direct competitors? Potentially. Facebook started with college students and LinkedIn started with professionals but both of their networks are now overlapping. When I return from a conference I add new contacts to both LinkedIn and Facebook as well as my own personal database because I have no idea which social network I’ll end up using 10 years from now.

Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn has posted a video of the new changes (which is posted below) on the LinkedIn blog. The new features are moving toward a similar interface to Facebook. Facebook is known for its clean user interface and it may soon become the standard interface for social networks in general. Check out the video below for more details on the interface changes to LinkedIn:

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