When Jobseekers meet social networks....

Today LinkedIn’s year-on-year growth is up nearly 200 percent in the United States and it now has more than 35 million members—many of whom were formerly employed within the hard-hit financial sector. And it’s just one of the many sites to which recession-struck managers are flocking: Xing (based in Germany), with its 7 million members and special Lehman Brothers alumni section, and Meet the Boss (based in the United Kingdom), which restricts membership to C-level financial types, are also experiencing burgeoning membership levels.

This surging popularity of online social networking is transforming the nature of business networking, with profound implications for the way business people manage their careers. But it also augurs profound change for social networking itself.

With so many people stampeding into Web-based social networks, the line between social and business networking is becoming increasingly blurred. An important question is whether the values and codes of conduct specific to the virtual world will come into conflict with real-world values and norms. Facebook, where the idea of a “friend” is directly embedded in the interface, is increasingly cluttered with self-promoters, career artists, and marketing entrepreneurs. What happens as this trend intensifies and those using Facebook exclusively for career networking invade?
There is an interesting piece on how Social Capital works on a Social Network

As sociologist Nan Lin puts it in his book, Social Capital,1 “Individuals engage in interactions and networking in order to produce profits.” These profits are based upon information, influence, social credentials, and recognition. The accumulated social capital, meanwhile, helps individuals to gain competitive advantages in the labor market as a result of privileged access to “resources” located on the social networks.

Still, for many there’s nothing more irritating than when a new “friend” contacts you almost immediately with an inappropriate request for a favor. Generally, it’s more advisable to approach social networking as a giver, not a taker, and gradually build relationships according to reciprocated favors.

I recall how p*ssed off I was when recruiters on Linked In would want me to pass on their requests to people I knew and valued without even a by-your-leave, never mind an explanation as to why I would trust them with people who trust me. Also, Twitter for about a year was full of people who used it to broadcast the innermost workings of their vaporous digestive systems and vapid minds - but after a year it became clear that, as Tom Lehrer's Hen3ry put it about life and sewers, "you get out of it what you put into it". As they note...

It’s a safe bet that if the economic downturn grinds on, we will witness further conflict between the nonrational instinct to connect socially and the rational calculation to build social capital for professional reasons. If so, it may put further strain on the notion of an online friend. We may find ourselves asking more frequently that age-old question, “What are friends for?”

I'm not sure the instinct to connect socially is non-rational, nor is antithetical to professional connections - but I think the "pump the room" sort of "contact making" will die, as will the Facebook idea that a "Friend" is indeed a random human you may not even know.