Monster.com launched their social networking service. Its an interesting selection of other's ideas. There seems to be an orientation towards strangers introducing themselves to other strangers with nothing to underpin it except ratings. No social context or friend of a friend structure. So I'm not sure this is social networking. What seems to be different is its emphasis on search with the caveat of demanding you provide a full profile first to search others, and the ability to save searches. It also provides a hybrid of agent matching (suggesting matches to you) and personal connections. They are cleary in it for the muny: you have to upgrade to VIP status ($25 one-time plus $3/month) to see full profiles, make connections, pivot (like or Ryze's pivot feature), rate people (explicit as hell, binary choice of Positive or Negative) or join Teams. Teams are akin to Tribe's "Tribes" or Ryze's "Networks" and are coming soon. Not as is usually the case, the most connected node, or in this case highest rated node is Michael Schutzle (former CEO of Classmates.com) is heading up the project. Classmates has been able to charge $39 per sub because the value of overcoming search costs for such personal historical connections is high. But job hunting and recruiting (executive and specialist excepted) is often less a task of search than it is of connection, when you find the right profile there is still a great deal of risk that a simple rating cannot hedge. Social context underpins old relationships, making new ones without it is an exercise in Whuffie. Perhaps the constraints they built the system with is best illustrated with the following path: Register => Light search => Provide info => Search => Pay => Connect => Message I stopped at the pay point. Someone tell me if this is more than a glorified resume database with new hooks to get people to submit their data. It should be said this is the first version of what may be many (not venturing into patent territory) and the space just gained its largest entrant.