Brightfuse, CareerBuilder’s experimental project, has been quietly gaining ground in the business networking community. A business-oriented social networking site launched back in February 2008 has accumulated a following of around 75,000 members.Working around the premise that referral recruitment grows in popularity in credit-crunched times, it seems that Careerbuilder is investing in the networking premise to support their further work in resourcing. Compared to LinkedIn’s 27 million members, CareerBuilder’s got a way to go, but argues that it’s going for a very different demographic - senior employees with six-figure salaries. We at BB (and our clients) always like to be in on these things whilst they’re still in they’re beta/alpha/never heard of it phases and, so far, Brightfuse hasn’t really promoted itself heavily, relying on steady evolution. So, whilst it’s still very very transatlantic, it’s well worth becoming an early adopter, if only because it’s so quick and easy.

Who’d have though that it would take a full two weeks for Ning to be yesterdays news. Hey ho. The latest 100% free social networking site tool is SocialGo. I know, i know, we’ve only just finished building the Blackbridge Ning network groups to aid company-wide DVD lending but things have moved on. Still, the interface with SocialGo is, on the face of it, immediately more intuitive and presentable than Ming, sorry Ning. But the developers have also stumbled upon a way of monetizing it too, with a paid-for upgrade package. Smart.

Explore it for yourself. Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Has anyone else started to really warm to Alltop? It’s a ‘digital magazine rack’ that allows users to explore all the top stories on the web. I’ve been following Guy Kawasaki on Twitter for a while now and his firm Nononina is behind Alltop’s delightfully different architecture and design. What’s new? Well, the site just looks so unique. It’s clean and modern. The rollovers give you bite sized summaries of content. Even the simple reversal of banner to footer offers centre stage to content. The navigation is intuitive and the feeds are updated every ten minutes. Try it and I promise you’ll be instantly hooked. What’s more, there’s a brilliant new HR section. Admittedly it’s very US-centric in terms of content but it does shed some light on some universal issues. Chiefly, it’s a really useful tool for following issues of HR technology which has always been led by our friends across the pond.

Welcome to August friends, and like me I’m sure you’re also overheating whilst frantically typing away to communicate through emails, sms, blogs, twitter, intranet, all other social networks….need I go on……but there’s one more hot little site to add to the list for our world of work.

Cast your eye over the handsome new www.my-ijob.com  For how long have we been producing videos to enable employers to express their people brand through engaging video and audio? Yes, a while. Well this new video job site could just be the ticket. It’s early days, but awaiting their partnership with AOL’s 32million monthly users in Sept could be the i-cing (sorry!) on the cake for all the hours of filming and editing that ended up on the cutting room floor.

You may have guessed by now that we at Blackbridge are following the Twitter zeitgeist with some zeal. And not without good reason. Anything that balances bite-sized engagement with guilt-steeped addiction has to be worth following. So, the minute we found out that there was a specific job listing angle being covered, it felt like an early Christmas. Twithire is a free job listing service for Twitter that’s geared towards helping employers promote roles to the ever-growing base of users worldwide. Content is geared very much to the US/development & technology community at the moment but it won’t be long before there’s an interesting tussle for supremacy. Tweets are free and anyone can post a job by creating a Tweet-key (go to www.twithire.com/key for details).

All of this geek-tastic excitement got us thinking, of course, about the unique way Twitter communicates with an audience. It’s easy to assume that a gold rush for a job-board style exchange exists. But the real beauty of Twitter is that any job-board can feed their roles to the site and build a following, much the same as they send candidates alerts by SMS. Nothing new in that, just a new spin on a familiar theme, you could say. But corporations can now feed their roles in the same way. The means to the market, combined with the messaging, is back in the hands of the employer.

As we enter the grip of a miserable recession abound with freezes and redundancies, the early-adopting recruiters will gain access to their audiences for free. Now that really is something worth thinking about…

Unlike Cupid and Psyche, Zeitgeist and Research are usually uncomfortable bedfellows. After all, why flirt with the fickle, especially when it comes to the expedient ebb and flow of web technologies. I’m convinced that one of the key reasons why researchers have been slow to report on internet trends has to be down to frightening speed at which things become obsolete. And that means no one’s interested in putting their hand in their pocket to buy the results.

Forrester, an independent research company based in MA, is a notable exception to the rule. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, both Forrester consultants, are responsible for Groundswell, the definitive tome on social media. Published last year to critical acclaim, it highlights real world successes in communication, from Sony’s use of blogs to Intel’s Wiki obsession.

They’re also responsible for the Groundswell Awards, which recognise excellence in accomplishing business goals with social applications. There’s a current call for entries, at which is where I sat up and took notice. The awards has its own fascinating system of appraisal. There are seven categories: LISTENING, TALKING, ENERGIZING, SUPPORTING, EMBRACING, MANAGING, and SOCIAL IMPACT. Of course, you need to have your copy of Groundswell to hand for the definitions, but you get the general idea. You can look at the runners from last year on the current Groundswell blog.

Personally, I found the analysis of these sites fascinating, mainly because it was all driven by real metrics and supported by hard facts, which is a rare thing to behold. It also got me thinking about the opportunities for building some genuine knowledge around the impact of social networking and apps and the employer brand. After all, if the commercial interests and benefits can be well documented and served up in useful chunks, there’s hope for us in the recruitment industry yet.