Social Networks that connect business professionals abound on the Internet, but known have reached the comprehensive approach or critical mass of LinkedIn. While Plaxo, FastPitch and others have reached out to business professionals daily trying to woo them over, none have scaled nor held their ground as firmly as LinkedIn.
However, CareerBuilder, the popular job recruitment site wants to take its shot at bringing down the granddaddy of all business networks with the introductory launch of BrightFuse.
With CareerBuilder’s existing market presence of 1.6 million users, they believe their launch of Brightfuse will have a significant jump on the competition. However according to a recent study by Anderson Analytics, LinkedIn currently has 11 million regular users.
Liz Harvey"Online networking is an important piece of the puzzle for workers wishing to build professional relationships," said Liz Harvey, senior director of online products for CareerBuilder.
Due to the success of social networking among professionals, LinkedIn is attracting rivals left and right. With the help of sister company Slingshot Lab, The Wall Street Journal is reportedly developing its own social network called WSJ Connect, even though their previous try with ‘WSJ Community‘ failed markedly.
Unfortunately, in my humble opinion, if you are gunning for the big guys, best be sporting some heavy artillery. And at first blush, there is nothing about Brightfuse, except for its built-in "CareerBuilder" audience that distinguishes it.
While the site does feature a a Facebook application, which allows users to publish the main components of their BrightFuse profile as a tab on their Facebook profiles, I don’t think this is enough of an incentive for the LinkedIn crowd to migrate over.
And my assessment of too many fish in one stream is that social networkers tend to fish where the ‘big fish’ are, and in this case Brightfuse is a minnow in a very big pond. Sorry Brightfuse, I think your flame just fizzled!
