It's a grim January day here in Oakland, CA, but Justin Phelps is grinning so wide it practically shows through the phone. "It's about 80 degrees, blue skies, there's a couple of cruise ships in the water," he says. "It's perfect."

Phelps is in Grenada, but he's not on vacation. He's the new chief technology officer at Blue-Stream, a Caribbean telecom and Internet provider, and he's describing the world outside his office window. Not long ago, the 28-year-old was about to become yet another unemployed Bay Area dot-com casualty and was packing up for a six-month trek in South America. But then he logged into Tribe.net-an online social network where he'd set up a profile of himself and his interests and built a network of connections. A friend on Tribe had sent him word of the Blue-Stream job after hearing about it from another Tribe member he knew from the site's yoga interest group, which happened to include yet another member who knew a Blue-Stream director.