Facebook – Mixing Personal and Professional

I tend to have two worlds that I keep reasonably separate – personal and professional. There is, of course, some overlap, but for the most part, my professional relationships are different to my personal ones.

I keep this principle in my online society too. My Facebook contacts are a different set to my LinkedIn contacts. It would appear, though, that Facebook are wanting to change that. Techcrunch is reporting that Facebook is making changes that could enable it to know about both sets, but treat them differently:

But that’s changing, fast. First, we noted that Facebook is creating friend grouping last month. By specifying certain friends as professional contacts, a whole different set of content can be shown to them (sans the dating status and pictures of you getting drunk). Or as Nick O’Neil puts it, Facebook may be growing up.

And now Facebook is quietly making changes to their data structure to allow for the concept of “networking.”

…

Once launched, Facebook (or third party developers) could add a lot of functionality around networking. Applications could be developed that show a social graph for users who’ve said they want to network that goes much deeper than one level of friends. You could, for example, use Facebook’s people search (which is now public) to not only find people, but see exactly how you are connected to them. In effect, Facebook could build a LinkedIn-type networking application within the overall Facebook network. And that could be very bad for LinkedIn in the long run.

I’m not sure how I would feel about having one tool and two different sets of relationships. The relationships are different. I might set my status to “Graham Chastney is feeling tired” in Facebook, but that’s not something I would necessarily want to tell all of my professional contacts. I’d also want to be able to mark all of the applications as professional or personal. Take the bookshelf type applications, I might want to tell my friends a different thing to my colleagues. Would I really want to poke a professional contact?