Okay, I feel like I’ve done my duty for the day. I filled out my Twitter profile, requested to follow a few people on Twitter, and asked a question to my connections on LinkedIn.

Everything was going fine until I realized that I no longer had two people following me on Twitter and I did at the start of the morning. I recovered a screen that showed the original request to follow me, and when I hit "Accept" I promptly got an error message of "That page doesn’t exist!" with a tease to hit the search button that says "Maybe we can still find it!"  Yes, I hit the search button and got the same message back.

No wonder people hate technology.

I did discover that LinkedIn works in a similar fashion to Facebook in that you get updates on your connections and what they are doing. A nice summary of connections who have joined new groups on LinkedIn (which I wasn’t aware of until now that LinkedIn had groups), changed jobs, added new connections of their own, etc.

This may be old hat to LinkedIn and Facebook users. And it’s all news to me….

P.S. Two great articles if you are just starting out on Twitter, both by Jeremiah Owyang, one that gives background and a simple get-started-guide and the other on the impact of using Twitter. As Jeremiah puts it:

"Twitter is a chat room, and conversations are a marketplace.

Twitter contains early adopter and influencers, many are news breakers, commentators, authors, bloggers.  They influence decisions, and therefore budgets."

Not sure that I influence decisions or budgets but I’m willing to experiment…..

Update: I posted a question to my LinkedIn network on a resource for my biz. Startled at how quickly I got responses (half a dozen in about an hour), given that I have less than 60 connections. Also got responses from people who didn’t have any leads for me. Apparently, the Q+A function is not only a means for gathering the collective intelligence of one’s connections on a particular topic quickly, but also an excuse to connect. Nice.