And no, the headline is not as misleading as you think - engineers from Facebook actually helped SimplyHired build this feature in the hopes that it will showcase the power of the social network's new Open Graph platform and the usefulness it can provide when properly implemented.

On the updated SimplyHired.com, you can log in with Facebook for a new twist on job discovery that offers a more personalized view of the job marketplace. In addition to searching by work titles, keywords, location and other such filters, you can now search for jobs at the companies where your friends work, too. Once you opt-in to this feature, you'll see a Facebook box popup at the top of a search results page after performing any search on the site. From here, you're one click away from exploring the various companies where your friends work and the possible job opportunities there.

Also, when performing a narrower search, like one by company name for example, you're shown which of your friends also work at that same company.

As anyone facing today's tough job market knows, getting a job isn't as easy as responding to a newspaper ad anymore. Every advantage you have comes into play, and none is more powerful than a personal referral. With SimplyHired's new feature, you can maximize the opportunities for that "foot in the door" connection by discovering, with ease, who works where. There's even a feature for sending a private Facebook message to your friend after you find a job you're interested in.

And for those performing job searches on the sly, SimplyHired assures that nothing is ever posted to your Facebook Wall and News Feed.

What About LinkedIn?

SimplyHired is partnered with LinkedIn and similar on-site integration is already available via that professional network. The company sees the new Facebook integration as complementary to LinkedIn, noting only that younger job seekers (like those fresh out of college, for example) are more likely to be on Facebook while older job seekers may be on both LinkedIn and Facebook or just LinkedIn.

That may be true, but Facebook connects you with the people in your life you're actually close to - your good friends and family: the very people who are willing to do you a favor in a time of need. This was the promise of LinkedIn, too, and while some still use it that way, many have been attempting to game its system instead.

As anyone who regularly uses the LinkedIn network knows, a good many of your connection requests are from people who you've never met. These are LinkedIn's own version of spammers - those trying to get around the network's limitations that force you to pay for credits for connections to people you don't know. Why not just friend everyone?, these people think, then it's free.

The "friend everyone" model eventually failed on MySpace, and it's doomed on LinkedIn too. Do your connections actually know the people they say they're connected to? So often, these days, the answer is "no." People looking for a personal recommendation are more likely to find success among their real friends, like those on their Facebook network.

A Great Example of Facebook's Open Graph in Action

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook privacy issues lately, after the launch of updated privacy controls, which pushed people towards more open settings, and Facebook's new Open Graph, a platform with tools for developers and publishers. One of the more startling initiatives, which caught the eye of regulators and U.S. senators alike, is the "instant personalization" program that immediately adds a social element to a website without your prior authorization. Because the program is opt-out not opt-in, many have felt this is a violation of privacy.

But while instant personalization is still experimental and could eventually be shut down, similar personalization is already possible by simply allowing a site permission to access your data and the public data belonging to your friends.

In SimplyHired's case, the integration of the two services, job seeking and social networking, is a promising example of the possibilities which Facebook's Open Graph can offer.

SimplyHired's new Facebook integration is live now in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia and India.

How TweetMyJOBS Works

The TweetMyJOBS service lets job seekers receive instant notifications on their phone when new jobs are posted online via the popular micro-messaging service Twitter. The company aggregates the Twitter-based job postings from over 7000 companies and maintains over 8250 specific job channels within those companies, all of which are searchable via their website.

However, it's the job matching service that makes TweetMyJOBS worth using for those in need of work. Instead of having to follow potentially hundreds of Twitter accounts belonging to companies, the service will match a Twitter user's interests with the available jobs posted to Twitter. Users can also specify a particular geographic region where they prefer to work. They can even use the service to post their resume to Twitter. When a job seeker and a job listing match up, the user is alerted via a text message sent to their phone via Twitter.

For job posters, there are fees involved for adding listings just like there are with any other job board. At present, it costs $4000 to list 500 jobs and $8000 for unlimited job postings. Single posts are $1.99. In return, companies are able to directly connect with qualified candidates while also tracking the clicks on the jobs they list.

Sears Holdings: 7000 Jobs Now, Hundreds of Thousands to Come

At launch time, Sears Holdings has posted 7000 jobs to TweetMyJOBS. The lineup includes everything from cashiers to vice presidents, a company representative tells us. And this is just the beginning. Over the course of the year, the company will continue adding all their available jobs to the service. Since, as noted above, the company posts hundreds of thousands of jobs per year, they will soon have thousands more to post to TweetMyJOBS.

In today's tough, competitive hiring market, a service like this can give motivated job seekers an edge. Since it allows for instant notification when a job is made available online, users of TweetMyJOBS can be among the first to apply to available positions. They can also rest assured that the jobs sourced are from reputable companies assures Rich Trombetta, TweetMyJOBS co-founder. Unlike on many job boards today, filled with questionable get-rich-quick schemes, work from home offers and other spam, only legitimate jobs are made available on his service. "We are very careful about the types of jobs we list on the site," Trombetta recently told the Chicago Tribune. "We eliminate the spam."

Interested job seekers can sign up for the service here at TweetMyJOBS.com.

It is important to note, though, that Twitter's growth has slowed down dramatically over the last two months, as both the time per person spent on the site and Twitter's month-over-month growth only increased slightly since April 2009.

Facebook and MySpace

Nielsen also released some new data about Facebook and MySpace. Interestingly, MySpace fired a large number of employees today, but Nielsen found that while Facebook is the top global social networking destination with over 144.3 million unique visitors in May 2009 that MySpace still seems to have at least once niche where it is performing exceptionally well: video. Nielsen found that MySpace still ranks as the top social networking site when ranked by video streams (116.1 million streams in May) and the number of unique video viewers on MySpace grew 22.9% month-over-month from April to May 2009.

We last covered aggregate stats in the middle of December and the new numbers are similar to what we saw then. IT and software companies are hiring more than anyone else, but marketing firms are now hiring more than publishing and social media companies, a switch since our last report.

The "Other" category includes the long tail of "hard to categorize" companies, like government hires, health care tech and gaming. Who are all these companies and people hired? You can see the lists at these links:
IT/Software
Marketing
Social Media/Social Networking/Publishing
Hardware
All new hires

We didn't break out hires by job title for this report but we did when we reported hiring numbers in November and December. Just for interest, here's those numbers from that report.

Have you made a new hire recently, or just been hired in a tech or new media position or company? Fill out our submission form and let us know.

Want to keep track of all the new hires we report on? We hope you'll subscribe to the feed, to the email newsletter (see top of Jobwire page) or follow the news on Twitter.

One of the most interesting ways to get an idea where companies of interest are headed is by watching who they hire. That's one of the reasons why we launched Jobwire, our site tracking who gets hired in tech and new media. SourceForge, also the name of SourceForge and Slashdot's parent company, has made a couple of interesting hires lately.

The company told analysts in its final earnings call of this year that it is now limiting hiring to "a few key select positions and only when we can find exceptionally well qualified candidates who might be coming on to the market." Combine that statement with Brondsema's mention of a whole new project and we're pretty interested to see what SourceForge has come up with.

Earlier this month, we reported on the hire of a new CEO at SourceForge. Scott Kauffman will take the helm on January 5th. Kauffman has a diverse background, ranging from music to advertising companies.

Neither the company nor the new developer hired have responded to several inquires this morning about the new project. It won't likely be a software index, that's taken care of already, nor an open source development tutorial site - the company's already got one of those too.

What will it be? We look forward to finding out more.

Update: A spokesperson for the company contacted us today and confirmed that a new project is in the works but said that "SourceForge is not quite ready to talk about it just now over the holidays." Watch this space for coverage when the news is ready!

We've tracked these and other interesting stats and stories about people still getting jobs at a time of economic downturn. Check out our chart-laden full coverage of this season's new hires in tech and new media over at our hiring news site Jobwire.

Wouldn't it be great if you could keep an eye on your other Google apps - like Calendar and Docs - without having to open multiple tabs or traverse from window to window? Now, thanks to the latest feature releases from Google Labs, you can. Introducing Google Labs Calendar and Doc gadgets for Gmail.

While the real estate is constrained, the view manages to provide just enough detail, giving you access to upcoming meetings and appointments and a glimpse of the latest documents on file.

But you can do more than just view the contents. The Docs gadget allows you to search your documents, and both gadgets enable you to create new items on the fly. The Calendar gadget also gives you the option to have a "mini calendar" present for reference.

To test drive these gadgets for yourself, simply head over to Labs and enable the Calendar gadget and the Docs gadget. Save your new settings and switch back to your Gmail interface. Now, you'll see two new collapsible areas below Labels that give you a view into your Calendar and your Docs.

Labs Holds the Key to Future Gmail Features

The rate of innovation coming out of Labs seems to be on the upswing. Lately, we've seen a steady stream of Google Labs features for Gmail, like Labels enhancements, Mail Goggles, and Canned Responses. And they're beginning to answer very real workflow issues - okay maybe not with Goggles - that enhance the functionality of Gmail and make it a more competitive platform.

It will be interesting to see what users choose to install and adopt from Labs - and equally interesting what they choose to ignore - because that will determine what Google decides to bake into future features of Gmail, itself.

I think it's safe to assume that these two latest gadgets from Labs are leading candidates for core Gmail functionality, especially given how simply and effectively they combine access to the most popular Google apps in the place where most users live and breathe - their inbox.

The Debate

On the pro side, Greg Fish argued that social networking profiles aren't resumes and companies should not use them when determining if an applicant should be hired. "A public profile is a vehicle for casually interacting with others in an informal setting, on personal free time," he wrote. "When companies use these profiles to find not only a professional but also an ideological match for a job, they’re misleading themselves and building ill will with talented prospective employees, who might decline to apply for a job for fear a comment about China on their blogs makes them persona non grata."

Fish's arguement hinged on the premise that by utilizing social networking profiles in the hiring process, employees were opening themselves up to potential discrimination lawsuits, and worse may be doing so on the premise of false information.

On the con side, Timothy Lee said that there were plenty of legitimate reasons for employers to look at social networking profiles of prospective hires. "Employees in sales, public relations, and customer service function as representatives for the companies they work for, so employers have a legitimate interest in ensuring potential workers won’t embarrass the company," he wrote.

According to Lee, people shouldn't fear that an employer will get a hold of their social networking profile, but instead they should expect it and use it to their advantage. By using your social networking profile and other bits of your online persona as an "extended resume," workers can "demonstrate passion and depth of knowledge for his or her area of expertise."

But Do We Actually Control Our Own Profiles?

Both Fish and Lee make compelling points. Certainly social networking profiles and other stuff you put online is public, and you should expect that anyone might see it. Carefully crafting your public online image to emphasize your best qualities is a good idea -- treat how you behave online the same as how you'd behave in any other public place.

But at the same time, the way many social networking sites are set up, we don't necessarily control all the information we put out there. It's true that you probably shouldn't be posting party photos from your college days on Facebook while you're applying for a job as an elementary school teacher, but do you friends know that? What if they tag you in those photos? You can remove the tags -- but only if you're a member of Facebook. Is it reasonable to expect people to actively maintain profiles on every popular social network or photo and video sharing site just to keep on top of photos that your college buddies might post?

The bottom line is that employers can, will, and probably should look at social networking profiles and other online information sources when making hiring decisions. But they should also take the information they find there with a large helping of salt and keep in mind that the Internet is not necessarily the most accurate representation of that real world.