CEOs Afraid of Facebook? Not the Ones I Know

Kevin Maney writes: Around the tech industry, Facebook is as much a business contacts site as it is a social site. That's due, in part, to the fact that in the tech industry business and social lives mix like crazy.

The new issue of Portfolio contains an essay by writer Simon Dumenco that says that Facebook creeps out a lot of CEO types. But I don't get that. CEOs with real security concerns always have to be careful about all kinds of information that's public -- like, don't have a listed phone number or put a big sign on your house that says, you know, "The Jobs Family Lives Here." Same on Facebook. Obviously, if your Steve Jobs, you don't keep a Facebook profile with pictures of your kids and updates that say you're on your way to Restoration Hardware in Palo Alto.

Looking through my Facebook friends -- and, again, I use this more for business than pleasure -- I see a whole bunch of high-profile CEOs and tech celebs who actually make regular use of Facebook. There's Marc Andreessen, Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, Michael Dell, Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Marissa Mayer at Google, Ray Ozzie at Microsoft, and on and on. They keep it pretty business-like. No goofy stuff on a FunWall. (I do, however, see that Steve Case is in Cambodia. What's he doing there??)

Of course, tech people are in general more comfortable with this sort of thing, and they need to use the latest hot thing if they want to be able to think what might be the NEXT hot thing. I haven't looked, but I doubt you'd find the CEOs of Exxon or Clorox or Wal-Mart on Facebook.

The Portfolio essay did make me think of one criticism of Facebook that hadn't occurred to me before. It notes that Bill Gates gave up on Facebook because he was getting 8,000 friend requests a day. As far as I can tell, there is no "friend request filter" you can set up on Facebook -- and that would be handy. Like, you might want to set it so no one can ask to be your friend unless you already have 10 friends in common.

Anyway, for all those folks who find Facebook icky, the bad news is that the world is moving toward putting more of yourself out there, not less.

Twitter -- now THAT's icky...