BrightFuse

» see brightfuse.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

CareerBuilder was, in 2009, one of the two or three largest job boards in the United States, and its business was a toll gate. Employers paid to post. Recruiters paid to search the resume database. Everything of value sat behind a login that somebody had written a check for. Then on 19 August 2009 the company announced BrightFuse.com, a free talent community open to workers at every level, where you built a profile and nobody paid anything.

It had been in beta through 2008, so people were already using it when the press release went out. The profile was the product. You described your background and your specialties, then collected recommendations from people who had actually worked with you. It pulled in your Twitter feed and an RSS feed from whatever you were writing elsewhere. If that sounds like a description of LinkedIn, it was meant to. LinkedIn in 2009 was large but not yet inevitable, and the shape of the professional network was still an open question that several large companies thought they might answer.

By July 2010 BrightFuse was pulling around 60,000 unique visitors a month, with membership reported at 100,000 at its height. Those are small numbers for a CareerBuilder property and respectable ones for a fifteen-month-old side venture. Nobody ever got to find out which reading was correct, because at some point in November 2010 CareerBuilder turned it off. There was no farewell post and no migration path. Recruiters noticed because their bookmarks stopped working and every Google result led to a dead page.

Turkey was not in the market for this one at any point. In 2009 I was at the end of the university years and hiring here ran through Turkish boards and through people you already knew. An American job site's free social experiment was not a thing that reached Ankara, and it did not last long enough to try.

~ the dossier ~

~ the conflict it was born into ~

The clearest explanation of why BrightFuse died is also the least flattering to its owner. CareerBuilder charged for job postings and for resume access. An open, free, career-centered social network where candidates found each other and employers browsed for nothing was a direct threat to that, built in-house, on purpose. Growing it meant eroding the business that paid for it.

Recruiting-industry commentators said this out loud at the time and nobody at CareerBuilder ever argued. A side venture that succeeds too well inside a company like that stops being a side venture and becomes a budget problem.

~ deleted without a sentence ~

What is strange about BrightFuse is not that it closed. Most things close. It is that a public company with a marketing department and a hundred thousand registered members managed to delete a product without ever saying so. There was a launch announcement, dated 19 August 2009 and issued through CareerBuilder's own press-release system. That page returns a 404 today. Both ends of BrightFuse have now been taken down, and only the second one was deliberate.

The domain had a life before this too. brightfuse.com was serving pages back in 2001 under different owners, and the CareerBuilder version also ran at brightfuse.net. Both are gone now, the .net failing to resolve at all.

~ what the era was actually deciding ~

Between roughly 2008 and 2011 almost every company with a stake in hiring tried to build its own professional network. Yahoo had Kickstart. Monster had its own attempts. The assumption underneath all of them was that the professional graph was a feature you could bolt onto a job board, and that whoever owned the listings would naturally end up owning the relationships. It turned out to work the other way around. The network absorbed the listings business, and the company that won was the one with no job board to protect.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »