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jeff pulver recently decided to publicly declare his lack of understanding of the differences between the various different online networking sites. unable to recognize that facebook is a social networking site and linkedin is a business networking site, pulver decided to jump ship and focus all his professional and social networking on facebook.

he formally announced,

after spending the past few months using Facebook, I no longer see the value of LinkedIn.

as if this wasn’t stupid enough, coming from a ‘tech-guru’, he followed up the initial post with another one in which he argues that linkedin is flawed, and then admits that these flaws are his fault, but he is still going to blame the site for the problems.

On LinkedIn, what I ended up with was a network of people, many of whom I didn’t know. I suppose it was my fault but I rarely refused someone who asked to connect with me.

moreover, he displays his facebook-newbie badge proudly when he says,

over time, not only was I inundated with “connect me” requests from strangers [on linkedin], but I also was regularly spammed with reminders to follow up on such requests.

he clearly hasn’t spent enough time on facebook. try it out for a few days buddy, and then you’ll know what networking spam really looks like.

a few things are clear from jeff’s posts:

1. he hasn’t been using facebook long enough to make an informed comparison and a conclusive decision between the two networks.
2. he doesn’t understand the need to and the importance of differentiating between social networking and professional (business) networking.
3. he is unaware of the differences in the demographics of the two sites
4. he needs to get in touch with mario sundar, community evangelist at linkedin, so he can school pulver in how to use linkedin more effectively, and teach him why linkedin is better at what it does (and possibly why it is ultimately more useful to use both networking site simultaneously).