I’m hip, I’m with it. Please join my LinkedIn network of friends. Check me out on Facebook. Won’t you send me messages through Twitter? Come on, it’s cool. We can totally hang out on the Web, and like, network and cook deals and just kick back for a second.

I got on the Twitter bandwagon, and posted a message. It said – answering the Twitter question, “what are you doing right now?” – “just spilled a cup of coffee.”

There it is. Not true, though.

“Sitting and surfing, procrastinating” wasn’t exciting enough.

The next day, I added: “damn, there goes another coffee cup.”

Another lie, but I thought it was dramatic and would portray a certain funny guy image of myself.

Unfortunately, I am the only one reading these because I have “0 Friends, 0 Followers,” according to Twitter.

Sadly, I’m not even sure which ones I would like to have. Friends or followers?

I’ve signed up to many networking tools but few have stuck. In fact, when I was trying to log on to Facebook to check something for this column, I couldn’t sign in. My password didn’t work. My Linked In contact count has frozen. My blog has 91 entries, and two comments. It wasn’t until recently I switched the desperate sounding “E-mail me!” link on my Web site (www.ristopakarinen.com, wink, wink) to just “contact.”

Seems to me, we’re almost frantic in our attempts to reach out and talk to somebody. We blog, we twitter, we chat, we network, send text messages, all the time, anywhere and everywhere.

There’s something very sad about it. Like we’re running on ice. And then, while watching Twittervision, an excellent Google Maps and Twitter mashup, and seeing the tiny bubbles pop up all over the world from Hannover to London to Ecuador to Iran to Japan, with the short messages in different languages, my heart melted.

We’re in this together. It’s good to talk. Hopefully, somebody’s listening, too.

But wait! Go check out my Twitter page. I just spilled another cup of coffee.