In June 2011, there is one week in which there was a huge jump in the number of people using BranchOut. BranchOut is the career networking tool or application that sits on the Facebook application in a way similar to Farmville and other games on Facebook. While these numbers pale in comparison to the LinkedIn total membership number of 100 million, one needs to bear in mind that BranchOut is less than a year old while LinkedIn has been on the block for a while, in operation since 2003.
The huge jump in users on BranchOut was attributed to some re-design and tweaking by the app developers. When BranchOut first came out there were complaints that it had a number of SPAM-like features that irritated users and some of the questions were not professional. It is amazing what a few changes can do.
With Facebook’s total users under 700 million users at the time of writing, BranchOut will definitely tap into this growth. Having spent some time on BranchOut, it has a number of features very similar to LinkedIn like endorsements, network statistics (that tell you how many people you are connected to and how deep your network is), news feeds from your network’s activity on BranchOut and suggestions of people that you could connect with. There is still room for improvement and great potential on BranchOut.
Counting against BranchOut is that Facebook is still viewed by many people as a personal space area where professional stuff should not be discussed. I see the lines blurring more and more between the personal and professional aspects of our lives which I think will benefit Facebook applications like BranchOut. 2011 is going to be an interesting year with regards to professional social networks.
