[...] you about both the company and the industry, give you advice about job functions, and help you network with important people. All of these benefits go towards furthering your development and advancing your [...]

[...] and professional boundaries. Most younger people are fine treating their workplace as part of their social network. Co-workers will all go out to happy hour and then continue drinking at their favorite bars long [...]

Interesting thought. When you envision this trend do you see social networking sites popping up for large scale interests (all sports) or for smaller scale interests (one sport… field hockey, for example)?

However, I don’t know about it being more difficult to find with a search engine like Google. It just means employers have to sift through more results.

As far as protecting the content, I feel as if most of the sites do offer privacy protections. Most people don’t seem to use them, however. Using your email and phone comparison, I would relate peoples use of networking sites to having a phone conversation with someone in a crowded mall on a speakerphone… do you expect privacy? I don’t in that situation. However, if people enacted the privacy controls it would relate to a person having a phone call in their own home. THEN you expect privacy.

If given a choice, with two equal candidates, would you hire the one who you can not find on a social networking site or the one with a picture of himself downing a beer while dressed in a tinfoil outfit? I can’t say I blame the employers…!

Thanks for stopping by Brett and look forward to your response!

MLR

I also think that we should begin a discussion about protecting the content on social networking sites. Just like we protect our mail and telephone conversations these new applications provide many of the same benefits and are not protected. As a result, privacy protections must be put in place whereby employers can not discriminate within reason against you because of pictures from your college days, or any other content that might seep out that while embarrassing has no affect on your ability to do a job or task.

To the MAX! Haha… I imagined you on Linkedin drinking a red bull slamming it against your forehead when you found a job posting you were interested in.

And yeah, I agree… there are aspects that you can find outright silly but you can still utilize the other features.

Andddd thanks :) I know a decent amount about my taxes. If you ever are interested in something in particular I can throw a few sources your way that might be of interest!

Thanks for stopping by.

MLR

For example Twitter. Sure people say they don’t care what you’re eating or doing at that very moment, but if this were the case all around no one would be following each other all over the place ;) And even if you don’t care, you can still market your own blog and/or friends and/or ideas that you are finding helpful on there. So it’s really a win-win all around if you’re willing to put in the time and learn how to use it effectively.

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ps: You sure do know your your taxes! haha….half of what you and the other person is saying on my blog was lost from the beginning ;)