Facebook has announced that it’ll let users organize their friends into groups with different privacy settings for each group. This is one feature I’ve been waiting for since joining Facebook and that would allow me to add even more friends and acquaintances.

Currently, I keep most of my professional friends/acquaintances on LinkedIn and my personal friends on Facebook. I’d like to add more people to Facebook, since I find it much more useful and easy to use than LinkedIn, but Facebook lacks the necessary privacy levels to make this viable. Right now you can choose two types of friends, those who can see your full profile and those who can see only your limited profile… which works to a certain extent. Ideally, you should be able to group your contacts into say, Family, Work, Friends and assign different levels of access to each group. I’d also like to be able to select to which group something gets posted (so that I can spare my friends from enduring my technogeeky posts).

LinkedIn is much less interactive than Facebook. It’s sort of like fishing… you throw your resume into LinkedIn’s pond, sprinkle some connections and questions & answers to chum the waters, and wait for the fish to bite. Facebook, on the other hand, is like your cool younger brother. It lets you show off your cool videos, your awesome collection of links or even those photos from twenty years ago you found at the bottom of a drawer. You can also, if you so choose, sit back, relax and enjoy the view – popping in whenever you feel like it. It certainly offers a much more relaxed atmosphere than LinkedIn.

But can Facebook make the transition to a more professional network without destroying it’s relaxed, youthful qualities? Will you stop using LinkedIn (or Facebook)?

Chime in below with your thoughts…