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.

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…

There are quite a few fantastic advances in technology in the film Minority Report that would provide hours of mirth and fun, not to mention some genuine value. The sick-stick, the jetpack and those brilliant hover-ships that would doubtless be liable for extra c-charge costs but are mercifully easy to park. However, the one resounding image most of us took away from that movie was the highly evolved computer interface that Mr Cruise tames in order to manage information visually.

So far, a number of developers have tried to lay the foundations of visual search. But the latest one to catch my eye is Viewzi, which heralds itself as “a whole new way to experience search”. Yes, it’s prettier. And, yes, it’s more geared to those with more tread on the tyres of their right brain. But what’s really interesting about it is how it allows us get a little glimpse of something that could fundamentally up-end the way we navigate the digital landscape.

Recruiters take notice. This technology would allow a resourcer to shuffle, assess and recall candidate video like a deck of cards. It could be used to negotiate your way through a truly interactive CV, packed with narrative clips supporting an application. It would absolutely revolutionise training programmes. And that’s just the start. The only thing that’s holding it back, other than the costs of producing compelling digital video, is the colossal download rates you need to make it seamless. But one’s things for sure. It’s only a matter of time before these kinds of interfaces make it out of the minority and into the mainstream.

Found this fascinating article about retention rates during tough times which is well worth a read. It suggests that, rather than sitting tight when the credit crunch snaps, people are less likely to hang around, shunning company loyalty in favour of higher pay. Engagement is clearly more important than ever.