Jobster head Jason Goldberg cut his teeth in the Clinton White House. As a result, anyone would be forgiven for feeling the need to separate anything coming out of Jobster’s camp from fact and, well, political spin. So here’s red flag No. 1 on the recent deal with Facebook, compliments of an anonymous comment from “John” via this blog:
Who is calling it a partnership? Jobster. To my knowledge, Facebook has issued no press release on this supposed “partnership.” Facebook seems to be very happy doing what they’re doing, thank you. Jobster is just a flea on a big dog.
Here’s all it is:
Facebook has an API that anyone can use FOR FREE. Once you’ve written your app, it appears on their list. It doesn’t even look to me as though Facebook polices the apps very much; I would hope they know a lot about Jobster, but who knows?
Then came the discovery by College Recruiter’s Steven Rothberg that competitive banner advertising was still showing up on Facebook, saying:
I can’t imagine that the good folks over at Jobster are too happy about this, but Careerbuilder ads are still showing up pretty prominently on Facebook.
In light of such commentary, I did a little investigating of my own and went to Goldberg for answers. Was their career center merely a sponsored page, integrating Facebook’s developer tools, something any other job site could do? No says Goldberg:
[The deal with Facebook] is 100 percent exclusive. No other job site can build anything on Facebook. We have category exclusivity across all things jobs and careers on the site. The only exception to that is the banner ads served by MSN. That’s where you see CareerBuilder ads.
At this point, I have no reason to believe the partnership is anything less than what Goldberg says it is. I agree, however, with doubters who believe committing just one line of PR text to such a big deal is strange, and the fact that Facebook has made no such press announcement on their Web site is unusual. (Side note: Multiple attempts to contact a press agent at Facebook by me have so far gone unreturned.)
I’ll continue keeping an eye on this, but it does, in fact, look as though “Jobster did have partnership relations with that Web site.” Wouldn’t “Bubba” be proud?
March 16th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
I recently signed onto Facebook using my LU email address so I can connect with other LU students. Since playing around with my profile, there is a feature in there where you can import your blog’s feeds. After you import your blog to Facebook, they will show up under Notes.
Facebook me!