Why Google Should Buy LinkedIn, Now Before It's Too Late | Hacker News Reader

Why Google Should Buy LinkedIn, Now Before It's Too Late

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25 pointssinzone26 comments

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't understand this logic. If it's a given that the price of a company goes up after the IPO, why would any company ever sell beforehand?

First, it's not a given.

Second, selling the company puts money in the pockets of the shareholders, while going public means the company is getting the money. Going public, by definition, means revealing your data, your balances, budgets, revenues, it might not look as good as it is now, especially in a bubble-based market.

It's (very) basically like the usual 'let's make a deal' bargain, you can either get 1000$ now, or gamble for the envelope that might have ten times that, but might also have much less.

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".

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

I have the impression that it is very much alive, if only used "professionally". There's a lot of money to be made there, though (job boards do well).

I always joke that it's a social network for people who consider themselves above, or too professional, for social networks. But it's the same thing

I thought it was more that it's for people that are too busy for social networks; those who want to be found and to browse some structured information on other people in their field without the time sink of status updates and shared media.

Sure, that's how it's marketed. And granted, it can be used to much good. But from what I've seen of it, the dynamics are like any other social network. A suit-and-tie one, but still.

No they are actually growing. Recently reached 100 million users. And don't think of it as a social network like myspace or facebook. It's rather different. On top of that they are actually in the black and have been for a while.

How many of them are active? 7? I've never used it. None of my friends use it. I know a handful of people with accounts, but they never actually use it.

Are you a student? Then you have no use for it.

Its experienced professionals with a largish group of colleagues. I can find nearly everyone I've ever worked with in there. And none of my nieces/nephews/kids friends.

Just about everyone I know or have meet through employment has account. Some are more active than others (I fall in the less active range), and those that are active see it as a legitimate networking tool, sort of the 21st century Rolodex.

Its useless until it's critical.

I know lots of people who have found jobs or been recruited off of LinkedIn--it's alive and well.

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.

Interesting possibility, but I'm not completely sure this would work. I'm sure that a "jobs" section of facebook would gain plenty of interest, but I think LinkedIn appeals to people who would like to keep their job-related networking completely separate from their social lives.

The line between professional and personal life will shift, and this may be a generational thing. But who knows, the distinction may sharpen rather than blur. One of the big reasons I haven't left a huge web/video trail of my own stupidity on the web is that I'm old enough that the web was still an infant when I was in college, and nobody had cell phones with video cameras and recorders. Now, anything even slightly unusual on a college campus will be recorded by at least a half dozen people.

You could figure that people will blend social and professional lives as they they get more casual about these artifacts. But maybe they'll just learn to draw very fine and deliberate distinctions - kind of the difference between getting excessively drunk at a work event and getting blotto at a bar where your colleagues just happened to show up later in the evening.

Anyway, I went a little off topic there, but maybe there's a long term niche for social/professional networks that are explicity not social/casual.

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.

A video explanation of Linkedin:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcfXij6t4LA

Definitely not. LinkedIn just has a different focus from Facebook, but it has thrived over the past few years, as Myspace wandered off into nowhere-land. Most anybody I interact with on a professional basis has a LinkedIn page, and I'd wonder about anyone who didn't, to be honest.

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?

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