BP4_2010021_DiscoveringWeb2.0Tools

Wow. I’m a little overwhelmed. When I first glanced through our assignments for the week, I was expecting to find a comprehensive list of Web 2.0 collaborative tools in our reference link. However, I did not expect to find an exhaustive list.

That said, as an instructor at a career college, I immediately started to peruse the sites classified under the Business tab. One of the critical outcomes for our students at IPR is employment. So, I was interested in finding a tool that could assist them with either finding work or networking with active professionals.

After investigating several different applications, Twitres caught my eye. In short, Twitres is an online portal designed to assist users in uploading and sharing their resumes. Clearly, within the last few years, Twitter has become a powerful communication tool. By utilizing that platform, the programmers at Twitres tout the instantaneous nature of Twitter as an ideal mechanism for resume distribution.

Strangely enough, I believe them. I have several close acquaintances in the design community, and they keep relating a story last summer wherein an unemployed copywriter launched a personal Twitter campaign to get a job. Through the viral nature of Twitter the idea was such a novelty that apparently, a nationally renowned marketing firm hired him.

Such anecdotes (and I’ll do some research to get to the bottom of that story) suggest that maybe Twitter could be a valuable tool for sending out a resume.

However, as I dug deeper into the program, I realized that all Twitres really does is distribute a file somewhat limiting its value. After a few more minutes, I discovered that their entire “about” section of the website was only three or four sentences long. Furthermore, wouldn’t it be just as easy to post one’s resume online and simply tweet a link to that location?

Yet when I researched Twitres’s parent company, ResumePark, I was a little more intrigued. ResumePark is a hosting and sharing site allowing users to view, comment, and track the interest of their resume in real time. From a teacher’s perspective, tools like this that assist our students in broadcasting their skills and abilities are extremely interesting. I firmly believe that today’s young learners should leverage the internet in their job search especially if the software in question allows collaborative support, data analytics, and feedback.

However, despite ResumePark’s greater feature set, I was soon questioning the viability of their business as well. Why would someone use ResumePark? Does the site really offer a unique solution to online resume posting? Why wouldn’t a young graduate upload their materials instead to sites such as Monster.com, LinkedIn, or even Facebook which are much more mature platforms and already garner millions of visitors?

All these things considered, I think we’re sitting on a bit of a bubble- a web 2.0 and widget bubble. Today, in the case of TwitRes, creating another Web 2.0 application can be as easy as adding some basic features to your main product. As was the case with another tools I was looking at (including Blue Tie, Hollrr, backboard, and Harvest), quite a few of these new entrants were useful and compelling but didn’t always measure up to more established products from Google and other major firms.

Despite my personal reflections, I think ResumePark and Twitres offers a really useful opportunity for college graduates. Furthermore, I think it goes without saying that tools like these should absolutely be used to help students post resumes, receive feedback, and apply for positions which match their field of interest. And, considering I’ve only scratched the surface of the sites profiled on Gotoweb20.net, I have a lot more exploring to do and my students will be the ultimate beneficiaries.