A recent post questioned the usefulness of Twitter and how to go about generating followers as it did not appear to be simple.

  Upon review of a variety of internet sites, I have discovered that many blog sites, social sites and others have a variety of new connectivity options that allow you to execute useful functions.  These functions include options to search your email in order to locate and create friend links with others whom you share association with.  The option typically compares the email contacts in your address book to their own membership database, allowing you send your contacts a "friend" invite. 

  Sites like Yahoo allow you to set up "MyYahoo" pages which allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds for news, blog updates from your friends, twitter feeds and more.  These sorts of tools are complicated and will take you a few hours to understand.  This does not mean that they are useless.  The tradeoff in lost privacy and datamining by third parties should be weighted, but if you maintain strict policies against revealing personal information in you business life by not posting your biography on every profile page on the internet and avoid posting personal data on any of your business sites, you'll be ok.  

  Anyway, the point is that there are ways of following others and acquiring followers by reciprocation as well as using "friend-finder" functions on various blog and networking sites.  Naturally, you need to be willing to have and write blogs to attract the interest of others, so make an hour a month to post a paragraph or two on three or four sites as part of your business efforts.  It's a new media / marketing world to adapt to.