“Down goes Frasier (LinkedIn), Down goes Frasier!”  Well I’m sure Reid Hoffman and the LinkedIn team have a counter punch, but the new privacy updates that Facebook loaded this week could directly cut into LinkedIn’s popularity as the “at work” social network.

A long, long time ago, (ok maybe just a couple years ago) Facebook was just a social network for college students.  Then they launched it to the public, and became the titan of social networks with over 350 millions users worldwide.  Meanwhile LinkedIn positioned itself as the professional social network that you utilize for work.  Facebook for home, LinkedIn for work.  Got it?

Well things just got more complicated as Facebook rolled out new privacy options that let you share your thoughts, comments, and pictures to anyone (yes Twitter, that is aimed at you), to your friends, to friends of your friends, or to a custom list.  Facebook was so scared of Twitter that they redesigned they home page last year, but that’s not the big focus as far as university recruiting is concerned.  The big change listed here is the “customize” option.

Customize will let you share things to specific groups of people.  This can be used in a variety of ways.  Now you can share vacation photos with your friends, share your displeasure with the college football BCS system with the world, share your recruiting events with candidates, and share a news story with colleagues.

This is powerful, very powerful.  Think of how you can share certain items with your intern class, others with engineering candidates, more with career services staff, and other items for campus ambassadors.  While you can do this with university recruiting systems like RECSOLU provide, this is the first foray of being able to use targeted CRM on a social networking site.  I’ll have a post about this separately soon.

With power comes responsibility.  I say stupid things often, so Facebook is dangerous for me.  Remember the University of Illinois student who lost his job offer after the consulting firm saw unflattering photos and discussions on drug use?  He thinks Facebook is dangerous too.  I’m so paranoid about saying something I shouldn’t on Facebook, that I have my privacy settings set so nobody can even find me.  I have a small group of friends where we share thoughts, pictures, and stupid stories.  I don’t connect to clients, colleagues, or even most of my family.  This way no matter what I say, it is protected.

Now with the new customize section, people will share the correct information with the correct group ALMOST every time.  Who is going to be the first person to be fired over these new settings?  Who is the first student to lose a job offer because of this update?  Plain and simple this update can be dangerous.  We all have sent an email out late at night or perhaps a text message after a couple of drinks that we immediately said, “Oh no!  How do I undo this?”  If you haven’t maybe you saw the episode of The Office (US version) where Michael emailed photos of him and his female boss to Packaging instead of Todd Packer.

There are three great tool on Gmail Labs that help with this.  To make sure people are not fired and don’t lose job offers, I hope Facebook follows Google’s lead and builds these updates in.

1. Right Bob? – Gmail actively checks the emails you send to make sure that you are sending the right information to the right recipient.  I had a client who used to always accidentally email me when they were trying to email someone with a similar last name.  This was at least 5-6 times a year.
2. Mail Goggles -During late night hours, after you hit send, a pop up will appear with a few basic math questions.  If you don’t get them correct, the email will stay in your drafts.
3. Undo – When you hit send, the email will not be sent out immediately, but a couple minutes later.  That way after click send, you have a little time to stop the email before it was sent.  I can name dozens of people who have called me asking if there is anyway to undo a mass email they just sent.

I personally use LinkedIn more than Facebook or Twitter.  I like the format, and I am a big fan of the layout.  But I really hope they come out with similar features soon as Facebook’s new privacy updates really sent a shot across LinkedIn’s brow.  Otherwise, we’ll see if LinkedIn will still continue to be relevant in the fast changing social networking world.  Remember how big MySpace was?  How about AOL?

Alright LinkedIn, we’re looking forward to see if you’ll stand back up and punch back.