Hi Kirsten,

Good question. I'm in favor of a system like Landing, where the site is owned by the University and beholden to higher ideals. Content can be marked here as explicitly public or private for sharing with the world. As graduate students we can still reap the benefits of social networking on a private site like Landing (though I agree that there's significant overlap with our forums in terms of usefulness, and I'll be looking to see how Landing evolves as a tool over the next few semesters). 

Most importantly, Landing isn't built to profit from your data. The terms/privacy policy here are, from my perspective, reasonably just and upstanding. 

I would suggest that it is somewhat more flexible than discussion groups because you have access to social bookmarking, filesharing, photosharing, audioposts, blogging, wikis, calendars as well as discussion groups in a single platform. From my perspective the ability for the user to set privacy for each item is valuable because it allows you to target a specific audience and the tagging allows future search. While I have only gotten limited use of the knowledge management functions of the Landing (due to how it is generally used) I have still found it much more useful reference tool than Facebook or Linkedin. 

What is truly sad whenever I hear this discussion is that the point that there is no literature stating FB review is a reliable tool for screening candidates never gets raised. HR tools are already noted for very poor relaibility and validity and this is just another way to throw empiracle evidence out the wondow and miss excellent candidates based not on performance but 'feelings'. I woudl love to see a study where teens with silly FB posts are compared to others with no silly FB social pic's and their performance on the job using objective criteria.