Branchout and Facebook Take LinkedIn’s Place

The line between general social networks like Facebook and professional ones like LinkedIn, representing the difference between the world of work and private life, is gradually fading away. Last week, Microsoft announced the possibility for Outlook Social Connector users (a plug-in that beefs up the interactive abilities of the popular email program) to import messages from their Facebook and Myspace friends, too.

In the last few weeks, LinkedIn changed its look and its style functions, simplifying the ways to interact within groups. The network has long offered the possibility to integrate Twitter posts in one’s profile and share it with work contacts.

The strategy seems to have paid off, given the growth in LinkedIn users, and, unlike its competitors, seems to have held its market share.

Now, though, Facebook is adding an application that could prove to be a sizeable thorn in LinkedIn’s side. It’s called BranchOut and it does nothing but organize friend networks on Facebook in terms of workplace relationships by fishing through information that we usually put on our profile. That way we can easily verify how many of our friends, and “friends of friends,” work for a certain company, post and browse job offers, discuss work in forums and search for the name of a person or business, just like on LinkedIn.

In the U.S., BranchOut has already received much attention from the technology world; now we wait and see how and when the application will diffuse within the network. The foreseeable potential of this application is enormous, but for many people it could be reassuring to maintain a certain distinction between career and free time, and that could halt its progress.

For the moment, the use of BranchOut — the brainchild of Ricky Marini, noted in Silicon Valley to have launched other successful start ups like Tinkle.com, a social game that registered 200 million users before being bought by Monster.com — is totally free. But makers intend to charge $30 per month to post and peruse work related announcements.