Ideas & Concepts: Young Business Social Network

Surfing the internet far too late at night, and I had a rare moment of inspiration. I noticed that most of the threads on our site are extremely personal - meaning that rather than discussing solely business in a detatched way, we tend to discuss almost anything in a personal way. We "know" each other (at least to the extent that you can through a forum), and although we ostensibly all initially came here to discuss and network for business, our most popular threads over the last day or two involve talking about Entourage, funny videos, and, yes, some business. That's not a bad thing; in fact that's pretty cool. This is pretty wordy for trying to make a simple point (it's 3 am here so cut me some slack...) but I guess what I'm trying to say is that our site has sort of morphed from a purely business community to a social community that happens to be drawn together by a mutual interest in business. So, what's the point? With the proliferation of social networks, couldn't something akin to YGG - a social network built around businesses - be viable? You could have both individual and business profiles, and network both on the personal level and the business level. Have networks based on company style (ecommerce, blog, retail, service, maybe more specific than that) as well as geographic location. Sure this is done to an extent on MySpace and Facebook but they aren't designed or built around these parameters. Reading back over this it's really not as clear as I'd like it to be. So anyway, I guess have at it for now, and tomorrow I'll be fully awake and caffeinated and do a better job of explaining this.

Having just spent a bit tooling around LinkedIn... imo it sucks. There is no personality or individuality to the profiles, you can't upload pictures, discuss interests, etc. I think that would be the extremely professional end of the spectrum you're talking about - where it really is very little part social and very large part networking. I would envision, off the top of my head, something more akin to a facebook or MySpace (in terms of page personalization, interest lists, etc.) with a lot of the business features of linked in (reccomendations, consulting/venture contact, job listings) as well as a few unique ones. To me, it would seem that having such a starchy professional site would hinder networking - how do I pick between two potential employees when all I'm given is their name and field? How do I find people I want to network with without it being extremely hit or miss as to whether we "work" together? There would seem to be a great opportunity for real networking with a more social approach to these contacts.