Indeed.com is now the fastest growing job search engine in the US according to ComScore.

With the unemployment rate high, more and more people are going online for their job search. Job search engines are growing as a result of this demand.

However, the Indeed job search site appears to be growing the fastest.

According to ComScore July 2009 job search traffic for Monster.com was up 33 percent in the US and CareerBuilder.com was up 56 percent, but traffic to the Indeed.com job search was up a whopping 90 percent.

Indeed.com is considered to be the fastest growing online job search in the US and is the largest job search site when ranked by pageviews.

In July, Indeed.com surpassed CareerBuilder, with 171 million pageviews in the U.S. compared to Careerbuilder’s 159 million. Yahoo’s HotJobs had 96 million pageviews, Monster.com had 73 million pageviews, and the SimplyHired job search trailed with 26 million pageviews.

CareerBuilder still leads among unique visitors with 10.1 million in July compared to 8.7 million for Indeed.com ( ranked number 2 for unique visitors )

These traffic numbers measure each site’s core job search traffic and do not include other areas of the sites like posted resumes, career advice, or professional tools.

Source: TechCrunch.com

The problem of fake personals profiles on dating sites is a problem for real users of those sites.

A personals profile verification service CheckedProfile has launched in the US to help people with this problem.

People upload a picture of themselves on CheckedProfile.com. CheckedProfile givers the person a unique identifier for the picture. The person then writes the identifier on a sheet of paper and takes a picture of themselves holding that page. The person then uploads the second picture to CheckedProfile and fills out the information on a CheckedProfile account. After all of this is done a live person at CheckedProfile verifies that the person in both images is the same.

Verified people are then free to use their CheckedProfile picture on any online dating site where they want to proof of their identity.

The verification process at CheckedProfile seems tedious for users and labor intensive for CheckProfile, if they have to verify each profile one-by-one with an actual person. It will be interesting to see how popular this service becomes with people and how CheckedProfile manages all of the verifications if their profile verification system works.

You can visit their site @ CheckedProfile.

Source: TechCrunch

According to a recent survey conducted by CareerBuilder, 45% of employers reported using social networks to screen prospective job candidates. This is a significant jump from 22 percent last year. Approximately 11 percent stated that they plan to start using social networks to research potential employees in the future.

Over 2,600 hiring managers were included in the survey, which was completed in June.

Of the employers who do online searches, due diligence and background checks on job candidates, 29% use Facebook, 26% use LinkedIn and 21% use MySpace. About 11% search blog posts and 7% search Twitter profiles.

No suprisingly, the top industries that use social networks and search engines to research job candidates via social networking sites are those that specialize in technology and sensitive information, including IT employers at 63% and Professional and B2B Services at 53%.

Over one third of employers say they have found online content on social networks that caused them not to hire a job candidate.

14% of employers have passed on a potential employee because the job candidate sent an online message using an emoticon and 16% report excluding a job candidate for using shorthand text language such as LOL in an email or application.

In addition, 18% of employers say they have found content on social network profiles that caused them to hire a job candidate.

Rosemary Haefner is Vice President of Human Resources at CareerBuilder and advises job seekers that: “Social networking is a great way to make connections with potential job opportunities and promote your personal brand across the Internet. Make sure you are using this resource to your advantage by conveying a professional image and underscoring your qualifications.”

Rosemary gives the following specific advice for people seeking jobs —–

1. Clean up digital dirt BEFORE you begin your job search. Remove any photos, content and links that can work against you in an employer’s eyes.

2. Consider creating your own professional group on sites like Facebook or BrightFuse.com to establish relationships with thought leaders, recruiters and potential referrals.

3. Keep gripes offline. Keep the content focused on the positive, whether that relates to professional or personal information. Makes sure to highlight specific accomplishments inside and outside of work.

4. Remember that other people can see your friends, so be selective about who you accept as friends. Monitor comments made by others. Consider using the “block comments” feature or setting your profile to “private” so only designated friends can view it.

5. Do not mention your job search if you’re still employed.

Source: MarketWatch.com

The New York State Supreme Court has ordered Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who posted defamatory comments about model Liskula Cohen on Google’s Blogger site.

Google fought to keep the blogger’s identity anonymous. However a judge ordered Google to hand over the blogger’s internet IP address, rejecting the legal claim that the online comments were “personal opinions”.

Protection of anonymous speech is a complex legal issue. Protection of anonymous opinions vary by state. In some states, the plaintiff only needs to prove that the request to reveal the blogger is being made in good faith. In other states, the plaintiff has to show evidence that damage has been done to their reputation.

Cohen stated that the anonymous blogger’s posts made it harder for her to find modeling work since the blog along with posted pics often came up in her job interviews. Cohen claimed the blogger’s comments labeling her as “skanky” and being a “ho” defamed her “serial monogamist” traits. Since this legal case was decided by the New York State Supreme Court it’s likely that the court’s opinion will carry significant legal weight and insuring that the controversial debate over anonymous internet opinions will continue to rage on.

Source: PCWorld

For more information on this issue you can watch the YouTube video below:

The snitch.name site let’s users search people profiles on multiple social networks and people search sites. Users can pick and choose which sites to search from a list of 39 of the top social networks and people search engines.

Some of the searches that snitch.name includes in their list are useless at best, but the site does include popular social network searches like Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Netlog, Myspace and Linkedin.

The Snitch search engine also includes some good online people search engines like Pipl, 123People, Wink and Zoominfo.

You can try the Snitch social search for yourself at Snitch.

A recent study by a US marketing firm suggests that as much as 40% of tweets on Twitter are ‘pointless babble’.

Pear Analytics randomly sampled 2,000 tweets from Twitter’s public stream and divided them into six categories: news, spam, self-promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass-along value.

Pear found that 811 of the sampled tweets ( 40.55 percent ) fell into the “pointless babble” category.

About 751 ( 37.55 percent ) of the sampled messages were categorized as Conversational messages. Conversational messages are defined by Pear as tweets that go back and forth between Twitter users.

Pear found that only 8.70% of tweets had “pass-along value”. These were tweets that users “re-tweeted” or passed on to their followers.

Corporate self-promotion accounted for 5.85% of tweets, followed by blatant Twitter spam at 3.75%.

News from media outlets accounted for only 3.60 percent of all the tweets sampled.

Pear plans to run the study every quarter to identify Twitter trends.

Source: Breitbart.com

Twitter and Facebook, two of the web’s top social networks, are aiming to be the number one player in real-time search.

About a year ago, Twitter acquired real-time search engine Summize, a search engine that indexes tweets. Shortly after the Summize acquisition Twitter rolled out Twitter Search and the era of real-time search started.

Since then, the area of real-time search has taken off. Twitter Search and Twitter’s trending topics have become a mainstay of Twitter’s microblogging platform and has also become one of the top searches for monitoring breaking and current news stories.

For a year, Twitter had no big rivals in the real-time search arenea. However, that all changed overnight when Facebook took over FriendFeed and rolled out their real-time search engine last week. Facebook’s real-time search can search status updates on user profiles; track pictures, personal notes, online videos etc.

Will Facebook’s acquisition moves and larger membership numbers and make Twitter’s real-time search irrelevant or will Twitter find a way to trump Facebook’s moves into the Twitter territory?

Twitter’s real-time search has only been in use for a year. However, it is positioned as the current leader in real-time search. When you want to find out what people are saying about current news stories you go to Twitter.

According to Mashable.com, Twitter has 3 main advantages over Facebook:

1] First mover advantage.

2] More experience with real-time search.

3] An open platform.

Even though Facebook’s real-time search is only a week old, their new real-time search can search a lot more than just status updates. Facebook’s real-time search has access to over 250 million users, the world’s largest social network can search photos, popular links, current events, applications and more.

Mashable.com notes some advantages that Facebook’s search has over Twitter search:

1] More users.

2] A more diverse search tool.

3] Talent and real-time search technology acquired from FriendFeed.

Either social network could win the real-time search race or Google could launch a powerful real-time search engine and wipe out both Facebook and Twitter from the real-time search market.

Source: Mashable

Here is how social networks can take dumb criminals and make them even dumber.

A thief who stole a computer and other items from a woman’s house logged into the the woman’s Facebook account and boasted about the theft, even going so far as to say that the Television in the her house wasn’t good enough to take.

The items were taken from Victoria Richardson, who resides in the UK. The thief took an iPhone, a Nintendo DS, a handbag, some cash and credit cards and a computer. After the crime had been committed Victoria logged into her Facebook account only to find that the bragging bandit had left messages on her profile, stating:

“on my new laptop”

“Listening to music on my new phone feels so good.”

“I have the laptop , phones ok but a bit scratched itll do, tv was rubbish so I left it, ds was a bonus, now to the porn shop, thankyou toshiba is my favourite make”.

“regards your night time burglar”.

Victoria Richardson stated: “I felt very spooked. I have never felt like that before. It felt like they were rubbing my nose in it.”

However, the social networking bandit shows that the criminal isn’t very bright. Publishing a record of their crime on Facebook can only help the police with their investigation. It wouldn’t even be surprising if the thief has a Facebook profile of their own, since they had no trouble figuring out what Facebook is and using it as a tool for their bravado.

Using Facebook’s social search, you could take the comments above as examples of the thief’s writing style and compare it to comments on other Facebook profiles whose geographic location is near the victim’s.

Source: Mashable

In what is shaping up to be a battle among two web bigshots, Facebook is making moves that suggest they want to take on Google for search engine dominance.

Facebook taking steps to turn itself into a web site that is more powerful than just a social network. Facebook recently acquired FriendFeed, a popular social network service, along with the visionary developers that created it.

Facebook has launched new search on their social network as well as the ability to share real-time profile updates with their entire social network. These moves as well as numerous projects in progress aim to position Facebook as an must use communications service.

As of right now Facebook is no Google, but they have attracted over 250 million users in a short period of time. Facebook has reached a growth point where membership is growing exponentially. Every new user on Facebook invites friends and family to join Facebook’s social network so they can stay in touch and communicate with one another online.

If Facebook can capitalize on its large membership and create ways to turn those users into paying customers for products and services, it could take its social network to the next level.

There are signs that Google is feeling some pressure from the success of Facebook. Last week Google launched some new social networking functionality on iGoogle, its personal web portal service. iGoogle is turning into an online service for social applications, similar to the applications enjoyed by Facebook users.

Social networking are a dime a dozen. Social networks like MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are familiar names, but there have been numerous others that have gone the way of the dinosaur. MySpace took off and became a household name, but quickly losing interest among users. Facebook is taking big steps to become the next Google instead of the next dinosaur.

Source: PCWorld

Spokeo search allows you to track people and friends on your email contact list across most of the top social networks like Linkedin, Facebook and Myspace.

Users can login to the Spokeo search service using their logon from various popular email accounts and Spokeo will search their contact list for users that are registered on the dozens of social network sites that Spokeo indexes.

In addition, Spokeo also offers special services for law enforcement, job recruiters and human resource professionals.

You can try the Spokeo service for yourself below.