Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled.

Today, John and I met Jeff Taylor for lunch at Tavern on the Water in Charlestown. I had no idea what to expect. From my pre-meeting google searches, I knew he founded monster.com, never graduated from college, DJ's in his spare time, is a sometime-correspondent for CNBC and is wildly connected. Little did I know I would walk out of lunch with a mission:

To become a "Tweetologist" - to study the uses and users of Twitter.

Now, I consider myself a well-informed person. I was the first of my friends to join Friendster and got all of them to join. I have a myspace account. And these days, I regularly log in to my Facebook account.

And, yes, I do have a Twitter account.  The problem: I don't use it. Because I don't get it. 

But I clearly realize the importance of social media in the marketing world today and willingly accepted the challenge.  If not to better inform myself, it should at least provide a little entertainment.

During our conversation, Jeff mentioned an article that ran in this past Sunday's New York Times: The Celebrity Twitter Ecosystem. The article comes complete with a chart of who-is-following-who in the celebrity twittering world - and I'm to start following all of them. 

Except, when I go to do this on twitter, I get the following message:

Twitter is stressing out a bit right now, so this feature is temporarily disabled. 

How nice for Twitter. I wish when I was stressing out, I could just disable my life for a bit.  

Guess I'll just have to stick to reading up on twitter for now and try again later. 

Who knows? Maybe this little experiment will result in more lunches with other interesting people. And maybe, just maybe, it will lead to a job.