Career management app for Facebook gets funding

A new career management app for Facebook get $6 million in funding from Silicon Valley. Here are some of the details.

In my blog, I've often made the distinction between Facebook (a social networking site) and LinkedIn (a career networking site). But it looks like a new app designed for Facebook by a start-up may make that distinction a thing of the past.

BranchOut is a new app that caters to the professionally oriented Facebook user. Jolie O'Dell, in a piece for makes the point that this app "taps into very real and vibrant connections within a social graph, not just the sometimes stale professional Rolodex stored in a LinkedIn profile."

With this app, you can type in a company name and find out which of your friends are connected in some way to that company in some way, increasing your chances for an inside track. It also works well for job seekers just entering the market like recent college grads who haven't had the opportunity to develop a professional network yet. Considering the amount of time people spend on Facebook (Citi analyst Mark Mahaney issued a research note earlier this month with comScore data that showed Facebook had passed Google in terms of time spent online.)

You can see a short demo of the app here.