There’s that word again – “network.” You could be the best, the greatest, the most accomplished at what you do – but unless you figure out a way to get the attention of the person who makes the hiring decisions, you just might lose out to a less qualified candidate. Why? Because that person knew how to get their name at the top of the hiring person’s list – while you relied on the “traditional” method of responding to a want ad and sending in your resume.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that that “traditional” system is broken – but face it: When you’ve sent out a couple of hundred resumes with nary a response, it’s time to take a good, hard look at the process. It certainly isn’t your fault that “they” changed the rules of the game in the middle; but now that they have, you’re going to have to learn some new tricks in order to get back in the thick of the game.

You probably know about the various on-line networking sites already, like LinkedIn, Ning, and FaceBook, also much-used by professionals these days). Networking works; I know several people who have had success in finding jobs using LinkedIn, for example, depending on how much work they put into it. It should be noted, however, that these people put a great deal of time and effort, fine-tuning their LinkedIn profiles, joined many groups, and built up a large bank of connections (500+). Building up such a large network could take awhile, though.

And while you should by all means nurture your LinkedIn presence, there’s a new kid in town you can use to get to the people who know where the jobs are: Twitter. Twitter, of course, is the Web-based SMS-type service where you can “tweet” (message) to all and sundry your latest adventures. That, at least, was how it started out, but Twitter has evolved – especially in the past couple of months, it seems, as people seek new avenues to beef up their business networks (check out http://www.tweetcruit.com/). And because of Twitter’s very casual and open format, you “meet” people online far more easily than with other services. It might take you a couple of months to build up a network of, say, 50 connections using LinkedIn – but you could get that many in an afternoon, using Twitter!

In Twitter, you don’t make “friends” – you follow people, with their updates streaming on your own Twitter home page. Often, these people will follow you, eagerly reading your updates as you post them (according to Twitter theory, the more people you follow, the more likely you are to get followers). All “tweets” are limited to 140 characters, and you see the whole stream of consciousness emanating from your network on your Twitter home page (mine’s http://www.twitter.com/newzgeek, if you care to check it out). Posts range from what the writer is actually doing right now (“Just got out of the meeting”) to links to interesting news or blog posts, to questions and answers or requests for assistance. Unlike on LinkedIn or FaceBook, which give you time to digest what’s going on, Twitter is very “of the moment,” and you can spend a lot of time watching the posts go by. It’s lots of fun!

But before fun, work. You’re here for a very specific reason – to build up a network that can help you find job opportunities, and the people behind them. It stands to reason that the more people you “know” – the bigger your network – the better. And more than any other social networking system, Twitter is the place to go for big network numbers. In the Twitter world, there’s only one standard whereby success is measured – the number of followers in your network. And when you follow, others follow you. It’s like being at a party – everyone wants to be the center of attention, but those potential attention-centers need you to pay attention to them. The more people you “know,” the more tweets you will be privy to, and the more connections you will make that can lead to “success,” however you define that.

That’s the theory, and there are hundreds of sites that will give you ideas on how to leverage Twitter in this way to get more clicks on your blog, sell more products on-line, or just enhance your reputation in an on-line community (hi-tech, of course, but there are many other industries where on-line buzz helps, like restaurants and hotels). If your goal is to enhance your reputation – your “brand” – for online success, you can just follow straight Twitter networking procedures and gather your followers.
Job-seekers, especially in a place like Israel, have to work a little harder, nurturing a network of locals, who of course will know better where the local jobs are. First, when you set up your Twitter account, put your “elevator pitch” in your Twitter bio (160 characters), so potential followers know who you are and what you can do. If that’s not enough room, integrate more info about yourself in your Twitter background, using http://www.freetwitterdesigner.com/. Also include a link to an online CV (the ones at http://www.visualcv.com are especially suited for something like Twitter).

Once you set up your Twitter account, it’s time to seek out Twitter users located in Israel and start following them, thus building up your network. Fortunately, there are a number of services that let you search for Twitterers in your area, in real time, such as http://www.twitterlocal.net/ (requires Adobe Air), http://twitsnear.me/, and http://www.tweetscan.com/. The latter can be used to search by location and keyword, as can http://monitter.com/, so you could try a search like “Tel Aviv Accounting” if you were looking for an accounting job, for example. But it probably won’t be that easy. You can also join directories of Twitter users, such as http://justtweetit.com/ and http://wefollow.com/tag/israel/ . And others (Google “Twitter directories). And don’t forget the plumbers – they’ve got a page at http://bit.ly/oDVJw (people in other professions may have more luck at http://twitter.com/jobangels and http://twitter.com/jobshouts).

Now that you’re connected, start tweeting – about yourself, your work, your skills, etc. If the usual tweet is a form of “microblogging,” as it’s been called, think of the messages you send out as “micro-resume-ing.” Send out interesting links about your industry, links to blog posts (you really ought to have one, too, but that’s another article), and the occasional “if anyone hears about openings in ___, please let me know!” The more people hear about you, the more they’ll realize what you’re capable of – and the more likely you are to hear about the jobs you’re after. With Twitter, “what you know” gets communicated directly to “who you know!”

I couldn’t find any hard statistics on how many people have been able to find jobs using Twitter, but there are plenty of stories online. And it makes sense that you have a better chance of finding something, depending on how well known you are in the community. At least for now, Twitter is “the place to be” on-line, and users actually read the communications the people in their network send out (they’re only 140 characters, after all) – as opposed to not reading the resumes piling up in their e-boxes. Finally, a case where the short attention spans most of us have actually work to your benefit!

Can it be? Would a multinational corporation voluntarily give away, for free, some of its most powerful programs and best-known brands – some of which have had a near monopoly in their particular specialties?

The company in question is Adobe, which last week released on the Internet, for free, a Web version of its Photoshop software. Photoshop, of course, is Adobe’s top-drawer, photo-editing software; after nearly 20 years, it is still the most used program for photo editing, selling like hotcakes every time a new version comes out.

If you’re a graphic artist, Web designer or photo editor, you use Photoshop on the job (and if you’re one of the very few who don’t use PS on the job, you still have to know how to use it). Now, if you want to use Photoshop, you don’t have to pay the big bucks for PS CS3, the latest version; just surf to http://www.photoshop.com/express/index.html https://www.photoshop.com/express/index.html> , upload your photo, edit, save, download and you’ve saved yourself a pretty penny. The site says it’s for US residents only, but I didn’t have any trouble with it.

And it’s not just Photoshop that Adobe is “giving away.” There’s also an on-line version of Adobe Premiere, the company’s high-end video-editing and -mixing tool. Surf to http://www.adobe.com/products/premiereexpress/ to check out the product, and follow the links to either the MTV or Photobucket site from that page.

You upload your videos to your accounts on those sites, where you can make use of the Premiere Express software. You can even get free (albeit limited) access to some aspects of Adobe’s PDF-making software, Acrobat. At http://createpdf.adobe.com/, you can upload a file in a whole bunch of formats, like MS Word, Powepoint, plain text – even Pagemaker (!) – or insert a URL for a Web page and turn it into a downloadable or e-mailable PDF. You can convert five documents for each e-mail address you submit, but if you’ve used up your allotment, the site suggests you sign up with another address. Here’s a chance to use up all those Gmail invitations you have; just invite yourself to open a new account and you’ve got virtually unlimited access to on-line PDF making.

Sounds too good to be true – like, there has to be a catch, doesn’t there? Well, that depends on what you’re looking for. First of all, the PDF converter definitely works as advertised, and has helped me out in a couple of pinches where I had to send a document or Web page as a PDF to someone.

True, there are plenty of third-party programs that you can download and use for this, but this is Adobe (the people who created the PDF, after all), so you can be sure that whatever you generate using their service will be a “real” PDF, readable by Adobe PDF reader, which is the standard program for reading these documents. Not that the documents generated by the others aren’t 100 percent compatible as well, but why take a chance if the PDF’s “mother ship” is giving it away for free, with no installation necessary?

As for Premiere Express, it reminds me a lot of Apple’s iMovie or Windows Movie Maker – simple, basic and very easy to use. Never having used the full version of Premiere, I don’t know what I’m missing by using this clearly limited version (the on-line version can’t be the same as the one http://tinyurl.com/6ohp2m). And again, it’s Adobe – so how can you go wrong?

But Photoshop Express is a different story. Having had a lot of experience with PS, I can safely say, What were they thinking of? PS Express gives you a limited number of tools, similar to the ones you can get with Apple iPhoto, Google Picasa or a whole host of on-line photo-editing software. It’s basic, with almost none of the sophisticated tools the “real” Photoshop is famous for. That’s not to say it isn’t very good at what it does; for each of the 17 actions you can use on your photos – red-eye removal, touch-up, sharpen, hue – there are six or seven preset changes you can select (there are no variations). On the other hand, you can’t make a selection in the photo (changes are made to the whole thing at once). It’s a nice, elegant, basic photo-editing site, but it’s not the Photoshop you grew up with.

My question is, Why would Adobe attach the Photoshop name to this Web site? It’s not like the program needs more name recognition; “photoshopping” as a term to edit photographs is practically in the dictionary already (http://tinyurl.com/5k7qjj). Surely they could have come up with another name for it? I don’t mean to be nitpicky, but it’s not like there is even a continuum of “lite” (PS Express) to “medium” (Photoshop Elements, http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/) to grown-up Photoshop. Obviously it’s aimed at casual users, such as those uploading photos to Flickr or Facebook (to which you can directly link from your PS account).

On the other hand, the whole idea of putting a version of Photoshop on a Web site shows that Adobe has a sense of where the future is going, and that’s to on-line applications.

It could be that the company also has a master plan to add more Photoshop-like features to the site (after all, it’s in beta and barely two weeks old). There was a bit of a flap over the digital rights Adobe claimed for photos uploaded to the site, but that seems to have been resolved (http://tinyurl.com/5vw32n.

Photoshop Express is by no means the only on-line option for photo editing; there are a couple out there. If you can live without the cachet of a major brand like Photoshop, you might find Fotoflexer (http://fotoflexer.com/) more versatile, with more sophisticated tools (many of which were found in earlier versions of the “real” Photoshop), but still easy to use. Fotoflexer offers more than 75 tools, as well as the ability to work in layers, add text, animations, distortions and lots of other fun items; it’s also free, and with links to all the sites where you would save photos (Myspace, Picasa, etc.).

As Adobe invented most of the tools on the Fotoflexer site anyway, I am looking forward to a beefed-up (and still free) Photoshop Express site real soon.