Jim Intriglia’s Blog

Recently, I was motivated to setup an account and establish a profile on Facebook. While I have maintained a presence on LinkedIn  for several years, not everybody that I need to stay in touch with has a LinkedIn account. Further, LinkedIn is geared for professionals and executives, while Facebook is targeted at the general population who basically want to engage in recreational social networking.

A high school buddy contacted me several weeks ago. After catching-up a bit, our dicussion turned to what other members of our circle of friends were up to of late. One of our mutual friends has done extremely well career-wise, and is currently the CEO of a Fortune 1000 ranked company. Much to my surprise, this friend did not have a LinkedIn profile, but did have a Facebook page.

Trying to contact my friend through his executive assistant would prove difficult and time-consuming. (How many people try to contact CEOs of major corporation using the guise of being a “good friend”?). His personal contact information was unlisted, not unusual for executives. So, I created a Facebook account and contacted my friend through a Facebook “friends” invitation. A few days later were were in touch and catching-up on the events of the past years.

An unexpected surprise was finding that my friend had stayed in touch with other high school friends who I had no luck in finding current contact information. Additionally, through my Facebook page, I’ve received invitations from other friends. I’ve also received invitations from people around the world that share common passions and interests.

As a person who values his personal and professional network of friends and associates, Facebook appears to be a valuable web service for staying in touch with friends and meeting people form all walks of life. While I can visualize people rolling their eyes wondering what took me so long to discover this, I would remind them that many similar services promise the same benefits as Facebook and fail to deliver anything other that an increase in junk mail.

I would also argue that some popular web services, such as Twitter, can be extremely addictive and serve to disrupt people from focusing on their own life pursuits. (For more on this perspective, have a listen to Mark Horstman on Twitter.) I have seen some unique applications of “Twittering”, so I may revisit Twitter at some future date. In the mean time, there are many other great web services rolling out that hold greater promise of delivering benefits that are of interest to me and those that I count in my circle of friends and colleagues.