Looks like you can now link your LinkedIn account to twitter, to find out from your LinkedIn contacts, who to follow.  Quite useful, as I’ve found a bunch of people I wanted to follow, but wasn’t!

https://twitter.com/invitations?service=linkedin

It looks like LinkedIn have removed the ability to post links into the Job Posting within groups. This to me seems very silly, because the whole point of posting a job on a LinkedIn  group is to get users to click on the ones they are interested in and bring them to your website. Putting the cut-and-past-a-link hurdle in their way is not a good idea. That’s not to say that people won’t be doing that, but it doesn’t make it easy. I’ll be monitoring the traffic from LinkedIn to see if this makes any difference.

Although its a bit old now, I still love this presentation about Social Media...

Over the last 2 days, I’ve had problems getting onto Twitter, and I’m not the only one.

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Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

In some respects I’m not surprised by the problems, after all its free, and its ridiculously popular, so the hardware needed to run it must be pushed to the limits. Who’s paying for it? I’m certainly not, and in these days of “build it and then figure out the business model” are we expecting too much when we include a free service in our marketing mix.

Twitter are clearly aware of the problem and have recently updated their terms and conditions to “leave the door open for advertising,” Co-founder Biz Stone wrote on a company Web site Thursday. “We’d like to keep our options open.”

Personally I’m not sure that the advertising model is the way to go…

Why should it be free anyway? In my experience, twitter is increasingly filling with spam, with an increasing number of followers being “make a fast buck” or “increase your followers” or worse still.

Personally, I think that if it was a paid service or a 2 tier service with a paid option somehow, I think that would limit following and followers to those that are actually interested, not just those that think that increasing their follower-numbers as the ultimate aim.

Twitter, I believe, is part of the social evolution, and in 2 years time we will laugh and wonder why we thought it was so good. The applications that use Twitter are getting better and more sophisticated; but I wonder if Google’s Wave will make it obsolete?

I’ve just started to test a job posting on Xing. Their site (which is much like LinkedIn) requries that you are a “premium” member before you can advertise jobs. Unsurprisingly, there is a cost for this, but its only a few Euros. Once you are registered you can post your job adverts and set up the budgets. You are charged 49 cents (Euro) per click,  but you can cap each advert on clicks.  A job is live for 90 days (which might mean a lot of clicks!)

It all seems pretty straight forward, but I’ll do a more comprehensive review once I get some responses to the adverts.

Posting a job on Xing

When I said last week about Twitter going down., I was joking, but it seems that they’ve been suffering outages over the weekend.. oops.

Having been a twitterer (is that in the Oxford English Dictionary yet?) for a while, I cant help noticing that I get a lot of followers who clearly have no interest in me, and are only looking to “expand their following”, as they seem to have that as their objective, either for some “I can show you how to become a millionaire with the secret of the internet they don’t want you to know, but I will sell you for only $50 a month” scheme. This is a shame as it will potentially lead twitter into chaos and confusion. (OK maybe I’m guilty too to a degree) . So how do you try to keep you follows pure. Well, I have a few tests I like to keep in mind when I scan down my daily list of “new followers”:

1. Number of posts: if your follower is following 500 people but only has 1 post, its out.
2. Photo. Is there actually a photo. if they cant be bothered or dont know how to add a photo, they’re out
3. Number of followers: If they have no followers (especially if they are following 500 people), out they go
4. Profile. too many “get rich quick on the internet” schemes, out they go

So I guess, the ratio of those that follow me to me following them is about 20:1, not a good sign for the future of twitter.

If you are still not  sure exactly what Twitter is and what the hype is all about, there’s a really nice introduction on youtube:

A new “Medical and healthcare industry social media community ” created using the Ning tool

Just registered, so I’ll let you know what its like once I’ve had a chance to check it out.

• http://www.MedXCentral.com

Medical and Healthcare Social Community