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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).

andy (mrbabyman on digg), reg (zaibatsu on digg), and i (msaleem on digg) have been working on a technology-focused podcast for the past few weeks and i’m happy to announce that it is finally live! the podcast is hosted on podshow and you can subscribe directly through itunes as well. all comments and critiques are welcome, and we all hope you will enjoy the show.

The Legend of The Drill Down:

Regular hosts Andrew Sorcini, Muhammad Saleem and Reg ‘Zaibatsu’ discuss the week’s most intriguing issues in technology and on the internet.

p.s. if you really want to show your support, please join our facebook group.

a friend just informed me that the nytimes premium service, timesselect, is now free for students or faculty members with a valid college or university email address.

A university subscription to TimesSelect includes:

• OP-ED COLUMNISTS Enjoy exclusive online access.
• NEWS COLUMNISTS Explore the perspectives of select columnists from Business, New York/Region, Sports and The International Herald Tribune.
• THE ARCHIVE Explore The Times archive back to 1981. Access up to 100 articles per month.

of course you don’t have to be a current student or faculty member, you just need to have an email address ending in .edu. just keep in mind to fudge your graduation date if you’ve already graduated.

the confirmation email takes about 10 minutes and once you get it, click the link to continue the sign up process and click upgrade on the sign up page to register.