This week’s new job means time to update LinkedIn. Previously, I’ve taken the view that all of my time with one company was a “position”, but when I look back at what I’ve done at Fujitsu in the last 5 years, it’s actually pretty diverse and better represented by three separate positions. That’s not a problem – LinkedIn let me edit the dates and provide details for new positions – but then I found that some of the recommendations people had provided for me needed to be matched to a different position.

LinkedIn doesn’t provide a method to reassign recommendations between positions – at least not directly within the user interface – but Garry Martin told me a way to get around the problem – this is what you need to do:

1. Select the position that you would like to move recommendations away from and click the Edit link.
2. Make sure that you have a copy of the details contained within the position (some quite cutting and pasting into a text editor should be enough) and click the Remove this position link.
3. When LinkedIn prompts for confirmation that you are sure you want to delete the position, click the Yes, delete button – as the site suggests, any recommendations associated with the position will remain, but they will remain hidden until they are associated with another position. Contacts are unaffected because they link to an individual person, rather than a position held.
4. You should see confirmation that the position has been removed – click the Add Current Position link.
5. Recreate the position that you just removed, using the information that you saved before deleting the original position. Click the Save Changes button.
6. You should see confirmation that the new position has been added – repeat steps 4 and 5 for each of the positions that you would like to add to your profile.
7. Click on the Profile link and select the Recommendations dropdown to manage recommendations – at the end of the list you should see some unassigned recommendations which were orphaned by the deletion of one or more positions earlier in the process. Click the Show recommendations link.
8. Select a relationship for a recommendation (i.e. the position to which it applies), ensure that the Show this recommendation in my profile checkbox is selected, and click the Save Changes button.
9. You should see confirmation that the recommendation has been updated. Repeat steps 7 and 8 for each unassigned recommendation.

After completing this process, you should have reassigned each of the recommendations that were originally associated with a position to one of a number of new positions.

For a few months now, a group of IT guys have been meeting up every few weeks for “IT Tweet Ups”.  Although the numbers have been small, they’ve been a great opportunity to expand my network (I missed the first one, but was at the last two) and I’ve met some interesting people.  If you think you might like to be at the next one, the details are below, including some of the people who might be there for a chat, some drinks, and some of Ye Olde Mitre’s now legendary toasted sandwiches! Unfortunately I have another commitment that evening and can’t be there (I lost out in the twtpoll for the date), but will hopefully make it along for #ITTU5!

These days, many of the items that would once have warranted a blog post end up as one of my bookmarks on delicious (posted monthly to this blog in a “useful links” post, with the help of Postalicious) or on my Twitter stream (and I will start to blog the more useful tweets here soon) but I have to admit that, for a long-time tech blogger, I’m still a bit of a newbie when it comes to social media.

I’ve learned a lot though in the last 24 hours – last night I retweeted (the old way – using RT and adding a comment with ^MW then my text – rather than using Twitter’s new retweet function) and the original author thought I was trying to make them look bad.  If getting a message into 140 characters is difficult (even worse than avoiding unintentional emotion in e-mail, which is essentially an emotionless medium), getting it into a 20 or 30 character comment on someone else’s tweet is tough.  Thankfully, that was all resolved with a few more tweets this morning but I noticed that some of the messages I saw were using .@username and that got me wondering what the . is for.

Googling . and @ is not easy so I asked @brynmorgan, who I’d seen use this method, and he explained that the . broadcasts his message to all of his followers, because unless someone also follows me they don’t see a normal @ reply.  I’d never quite understood if my followers saw all of the responses that I posted to @username and now it makes sense.  I thought that might be useful for others so, if assuming I have understood this correctly:

• @username will direct a tweet to a specific user and if someone follows both the sender and the specified username, they will see the message.
• .@username will direct a tweet to a user and all of the sender’s followers will see the message.
• D username is a direct message between two Twitter users (i.e. a private message).

Thanks to Bryn for educating me and, by the way, there’s some interesting commentary on social media over on the Brynovation blog.

I’m not really very big on “social networking”. That might sounds strange for a blogger but when I started writing this blog it was really an easy way for me to store my notes and a few links on the web. In fact, had I known about del.icio.us back then, I’d probably never have started the blog and would just have posted links up there. Hang on… I do have an account at delicious… is that social networking? Ah. I do Flickr too. That’s another one. Sometimes I scrobble at last.fm – so that’s another. I’m also on LinkedIn and occasionally seen on Facebook (which I detest… so really it’s just a place where my Twitter feed gets republished as my status and friends comment on it – whereas once upon a time we might have had a con-ver-sa-tion) and ah… that means I do Twitter too (actually I have two Twitter accounts… the one that feeds Facebook and another other for the geeky stuff).

Thinking about it, maybe I am into social networking after all!

Twitter was the one that mystified me for the longest. I just didn’t “get” it. I’d heard people banging on about it on podcasts and it just seemed to be a way of blogging the minutiae of the day (“I had Muesli for breakfast”, etc.). Then I signed up and figured it was like a big public SMS service combined with a direct message capability (a bit like e-mail?)… I still didn’t see what the fuss was about.

I started to understand where Twitter could add some value just over a week ago, when I was enjoying a meal in a local café and noticed that, in addition to free WiFi (I know where I will be going now when the kids are too noisy and I want to get some work done!), they were twittering their specials @muchadocafe. I guess the idea is that people can follow them, think “that sounds nice” and come over for a bite to eat at lunchtime. Nice idea. Shame they seem to have stopped posting updates.

The penny finally dropped last Monday when I was watching the live stream of Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference keynote presentation and the site was showing Twitter updates with the #wpc09 hashtag. All of a sudden I realised that, in real time, I could see the comments (or “tweets”) that other people were creating and understand what they thought about the content. That was pretty cool. So cool in fact that I signed up for my second account (the one with the geeky stuff on it). Now I can tweet the little things that aren’t really worth blogging (if you visit the website you may notice that I have the 5 most recent tweets on display in the right-hand sidebar – thanks to Anders Ross’s article on 10 Twitter hacks for your WordPress blog). I also use Twitterfeed to tweet my new blog posts for people that don’t subscribe to the RSS… and that should drive some traffic to the website. No wonder Microsoft has got so into Twitter recently – it’s a great site for creating marketing buzz.

I can understand why no-one has really managed to adequately explain Twitter to me before (not even the video I linked to when I originally signed up) – it’s something you have to see in action to get your head around but, now I’ve “got it”, I think I might be hooked. Oh dear!

As for the rise in popularity for the plethora of social networking sites that exist today… I can see where they have their place in modern society but I have to disagree with Microsoft’s Viral Tapara, who tried to indicate the importance of such sites at a recent event by commenting that people used to wish one another happy birthday with a card and today they do it on Facebook. Absolutely not. In the same way that ending a relationship by text is insincere and socially unacceptable, there are still some social activities that have to take place in the real world. As my friends and colleagues know only to well from someone who has refused to embrace SMS and instant messaging as effective forms of communication, sometimes there is no substitute for picking up the phone or meeting face to face.

Follow markwilson.it on Twitter @markwilsonit

So, last night I was in the pub with Richard, Stuart and Alex and the conversation turned to Facebook. I felt like some sort of social leper as, until then, I hadn’t responded to the various Facebook requests that I’ve received and the extent of my online social networking was LinkedIn – which is a professional networking site – in fact I think the word pretentious was used by someone (a little harsh I feel).

Anyway, I’ve done it. I’m now on Facebook, and I wasted a good chunk of this afternoon there. I suppose it will be Twitter next (although I still don’t see the attraction there).

So if you are reading this blog and you know me personally then I’d be happy to hook up with you as a friend on Facebook (after all, social networks get pretty lonely if there is no-one there to socialise with). But, just as for my LinkedIn profile (where I only accept invitations from people I know, have worked with, and would be happy to work with again), I won’t accept invitations on Facebook from people I don’t consider to be friends – it’s amazing how many people think I would like to link to them because we work at the same company (even though we have never had any interaction).

Bah humbug!