Just a quick post before I head off to Thailand for 6 days.

I’ve been curious to see if facebook was starting to index profile updates into their advertising mix.

Basically, the premise is, if you write an update, facebook would index keywords in that update and begin pushing advertisements to you based on those keywords in realtime.

I was unsure if they had started this process in Australia, as I was yet to see any evidence of it happening, until this morning.

On Thursday morning I wrote this update “Heading to the land of Thai’s v soon.”

Then this morning I get this ad.

I don’t have the word Thailand anywhere in my profle info. The only indication I had given to facebook that I was leaving to Thailand was that update. It didn’t even include the countries full name, yet still, I managed to receive a relevant ad specific to Thailand.

Looks like facebook are starting to ramp up their real-time advertising activities.

[Article published by Michael Watkins for technation on Dec 16th 2008]

Sydney based garage startup Jobfeedr.com is on to something.

The site crawls all the worlds major IT jobs boards every few minutes, then automatically feeds these jobs to their homepage, your twitter channel or via RSS to your browser.

The service is one condusive to the times. Quoting co-founder Mike Nicholls -

More people [are] fighting for less jobs, more online job sites that need to be checked constantly for new jobs, job sites making candidates wade through 100s of screens to get through jobs just so they can show more ad impressions. Looking for jobs turns into a full time job.

In making this process automated, the Jobfeedr team just saved thousands of stressed out job hunters the hassle of wading through the irrelevant material that is pushed at them through the major jobs boards.

The setup process is dead simple. Head to Jobfeedr.com, set the specific fields you want for your feed then hit ok. A list of job’s will then appear below. Click on the twitter channel link of a chosen job, this will direct you to that job category’s twitter feed on twitter. Click follow and presto, all jobs found by jobfeedr relating to that specific job field will be automatically twittered to your feed.

Same goes with RSS. Click the RSS button and that stream will begin feeding into your browser.

I really do see some promise here. The idea is great, serves a real purpose and will save alot of time stretched people alot of time!

The global approach from launch is encouraging, the team is not just focusing on the smaller Australian or Australasian markets, they have San Francisco and New York City on the cards too – something we dont see enough of in the Aussie startup scene.

Mike Nicholls and Dale Hurley look like an experienced team who have the knowledge to keep pushing Jobfeedr forward.

Lastly and most importantly, although the look is currently very bare, the interface design and functionality is extremely simple, which is something alot of other twitter app and RSS app developers have yet to master.

Advert’s may come into play later down the track, with small ad’s being integrated into the twitter feed and possibly the RSS feeds. However for now, the team is focused on getting the core technology right, believing if they do this, users will pick up and advertising streams will follow.

Keep an eye on Jobfeedr in the future and if your looking for your next job, employ jobfeedr to do the work for you, saving you alot of time for other things during these xmas holidays.