Piers Jones

Twitterjobsearch

A relatively new job aggregator twitterjobsearch is pulling together all the jobs posted to twitter across the web. In this interview with Robert Scoble, cofounder Willaim Fischer claims that in the past month twitterjobsearch have used natural language search to publish 280k unique job vacancies to their site, making it one of the top five job boards in the world by jobs volume already.

found on cheezehead

Facebook and business roundup

Lots of debate this week around whether Facebook at work is 'OK' and what the business opportunity might be.

Here's a roundup for anyone that doesn't want to spend all week reading RSS feeds:

JP Rangaswami has a whole series on Facebook and the Enterprise

Marketing pilgrim did such a nice post that I'm tempted to let them off for using the word 'leveraging'

Master of 500 hats gets quite passionate about it

Scoble has been twittering about it

Mashable predicts that targetted facebook ads are on the way

Trip advisor paid $3 million for a facebook app

And one of RBI's blogs covered it from the HR angle

Facebook and business: Can Facebook Apps be commercial?

Opinion seems to be divided on this point.

Readwriteweb says build a business on Facebook and details Bay Partners who are funding the development of Facebook apps whether commercial or not.

Om Malik thinks the idea is bonkers

I'm still making my mind up. I'm not sure that just being a Facebook app is enough for a sustainable business, but it could be a great way to promote and existing one.

Popfly mashups, dont underestimate the power of a good user interface

The recently announced MicroSoft popfly mashup and web page tool looks good. So far the reaction I've read seems to be that this is only for individuals and maybe small companies who lack development resource. Microsoft would seem to agree.

I don't see why it shouldn't be even more widely used than that. I'm sure that many people with a keen interest in online but who can't code (like me!) would love to get their hands on this type of service.

With the right user interface it should be easy to pull together mashups and web pages without having to spend hours with the code. So, why couldn't this approach be used in all businesses?

It would democratise creativity for anyone in an organisation that has an interesting idea and wants to try it out online. An element of collaboration and reuse is also good for innovation. It looks like a space to play with ideas in a framework which I imagine will be well tested and robust.

There will always be a need for excellent developers, especially for complex products.  However sometimes for ideas in the early stages you just want to pull content (API's?) together quickly, get them out there into the real world and see where the interest is. Popfly might be a good way to achieve those goals.

Of course I haven't tried it yet!  I've requested an alpha log in along with the rest of the world so will see how long it takes as I think it's a pretty limited alpha.

Web 2.0 business models roundup

Some articles from over the weekend on how web 2.0 / online thinking is being applied to business.

• Daniela Barbosa on how gaming techniques are being applied to business for example by Seriosity
• OpenBusiness report on the concept of P2P finance and 4 companies that operate in that space.
• Techcrunch shows how Buzka uses Social Bookmarking for a Business function