Stephanie Rosenbloom of the New York Times wrote today on new features of familiar social networking sites like Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. She writes that these websites are increasingly becoming platforms for job searching and professional contacts. Modernizing Mark Granovetter’s hypothesis in his paper “The Strength of Weak Ties” - that many people actually find work through weak ties in their social networks - Rosenbloom suggests that these modern social networking websites are facilitating a link directly between an employer and a job searcher. Rosenbloom cites the job search website, CareerBuilder.com as among the new job search Facebook applications which allows companies to find potential employees on Facebook. Perhaps Facebook is taking a lead from LinkedIn, the professional networking website that Rosenbloom cites as the website that executives are most interested in recruiting from. One company’s communications director in Rosenbloom’s article got his job through LinkedIn, and even turns his virtual social network into a physical one, when he organizes “LinkedIn Live” meetings for candidates and employers that are connected on the website. As noted by this executive, social and professional networking sites like LinkedIn, and now even Facebook or MySpace, are increasingly forging ties between employers and job candidates. It seems that many of the connections formed via these networking sites might never have occurred otherwise, allowing for greater and broader opportunities for online networkers in terms of job searching. Rosenbloom suggests that perhaps we no longer need to reach out to the “weak ties” of our network when we are in need of work, à la Mark Granovetter, but can simply place ourselves in one of the newly developing professional networks like LinkedIn and make our own connections.