Facebook adds me-too feature - "People You May Know"

Facebook has quietly rolled out a new feature called "People You May Know", which, as the names suggests, attempts to identify members of the social networking site who you likely know but haven't actually "connected" with yet i.e. invited to be a "friend."

If you're a LinkedIn user, then the new functionality will be all too familiar -- the business-oriented social networking site offers an identical feature with the same name! Having said that, LinkedIn recently copied one of Facebook's most innovative features: the news feed that aggregates 'friend' updates and activity on the site.

Perhaps, however, the broader takeaway is that almost all social networking features are easily replicated, resulting in the broad functionality being a commodity. The end result is that it's often the network effects only that distinguish one service from another.

(image via CNET)