BeKnown is good news! There are lots of posts out there with facts and screen shots, so I skip that.

Here some initial thoughts.

1) It’s fantastic to see potential competition to LinkedIn; Moster has been one of the few big players capable of that. LinkedIn’s quality has been hurt by not having competitors. Maybe LinkedIn will now do some fixing bugs, cleaning up user interface, and keeping features up and prices down as a result. Maybe we’ll even see last names shows in full for 3rd level connections again, what do you think?

2) There’s a large crowd of people that are, like my daughter Jane, on Facebook all the time and rarely or never on LinkedIn. Looking at the statistics, many of those folks seem likely to get engaged in BeKnown. They will be building profiles from scratch. But LinkedIn already has millions of profiles. Will people will have to choose LI or BK, or will there be a way to mix/sync them?

3) Privacy comes across as the largest perceived threat to BeKnown. Monster’s architects have done quite a bit to protect privacy but users may keep privacy concerns up even if you try to talk them out of that.

4) BeKnown carries an attractive, powerful referral functionality, where friends refer friends to jobs. We haven’t yet seen a referral system in software at this scale. It’s interesting how it will evolve.

5) BeKnown allows companies to show a different side of themselves: their working environment, culture, and hiring, as opposed to marketing that was usually fan pages’ purpose.

It’s not yet clear what “sharing” functionality is going to be like. Can I post a job and share outside of BeKnown? It also remains to see what the surface/open web component is going to be like.

Good luck to BeKnown. I have joined and hope you will, too.