We’ve been yabbing on a lot recently about micro-blogging and the impact it’s having on various industries. It seems its popularity in the UK is growing and that’s not just down to personal users either.

But the biggest proof of all is the stamp that is left after a global event. Enter the Olympics. 8 is a lucky number in China, and they’re celebrating these games on twitter by applying the tag #080808. How many tags you ask?

According to Read Write Web:

Currently if you search for #080808, you can see a new #080808 tweet coming up every 0.5 seconds!

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…

Latest figures from Hitwise suggest that Twitter has just become ever more popular in Blighty - last week the site’s share of UK internet visits was 70% higher its share of visits in America. Interestingly, Twitter looks more likely to enter the mainstream here than across the pond. Twitteriffic, the iPhone’s tweet interface, has US ads served at the moment, with UK content planned. That step towards engaging local audiences could mean a big push on taking the channel more seriously. Any thoughts out there?

Depending on who you talk to, Twitter is big on zeitgeist or big on time-waste. But when you consider just how important mobile communications is as a growing channel, any tool that relies heavily on SMS should have it’s fifteen minutes of fame. The concept is simple - take the status updates from Facebook and transfer them to a mobile platform that allows people to communicate in bite-sized nuggets of information. Aside from the immediacy of the medium (walking down the road, bump into Winehouse, try to take picture, get punched, tell your mates, all in an instant) there are some really interesting engagement angles for employers or corporates on the horizon. If you want to take the plunge, twit-yourself-silly and find me here.