Can Facebook find work in Corporate America?

The social-networking site Facebook has opened up registration beyond students to a select group of corporations, allowing employees at those businesses to set up accounts.

The move follows weeks of speculation that the student-oriented site was shopping itself around. While Facebook, like recent News Corp. acquisition MySpace, has a tremendous following, bloggers scoffed at the $2 billion valuation attached to the Facebook rumor.

The Facebook expansion, which includes tech firms like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, along with mainstream names like The Gap and Pepsi, could give the company a broader base beyond college students, and to keep them linked into the system once they graduate. But bloggers were split on how successful it would be.

Blog community response:

"I don't think you'll see the same phenomenal viral exponent or use patterns over time. Professionals just don't talk to dozens of classmates a day or live in dorms with hundreds of peers, and they certainly don't have 51 minutes a day to spend looking at cute members of the opposite sex and writing on each others' walls."
--Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing

"If corporate facebook takes off like in colleges, Facebook could connect 'own' the job market. In that case, not only does LinkedIn become completely irrelevant, but HotJobs, Monster and the like will face a two front war: Craigslist on one side, 'Mark's list'/Facebook Jobs on the other."
--Minority Rapport

"There's no doubt that Facebook has the ability to pick out so called 'elite' (read Fortune 500) companies and build the kinds of networks (and alunmi links) LinkedIn is trying to hard to create. Pretty shrewd, eh?"
--Susan Mernit's Blog