Twitter and LinkedIn? - I'm confused!

I’m confused.

Or, maybe I’m just plain dumb (and getting dumber and dumber.)

a) I don’t get the point of “Twitter”.

I’m not signed up for Twitter but I’ve seen tweets from people (on different sites, etc), and most of the “tweets” I see are very brief …. and mostly irrelevant, nonsensical, uninteresting comments, such as “I just had dinner at Legal Seafoods and dinner was good”. (Why would I need to know that or even want to know that?) If people used Twitter to tweet “breaking news” …. news that was really interesting and important, then maybe I’d consider “tweeting” to be a useful thing. But, apparently, people use Twitter just like they used to use “text messages.” Is the purpose of Twitter to replace text messaging? …. where “tweets” are used as “blast” text messages …. going out to a number of people all at the same instant (as was the case when people “blasted” faxes to multiple recipients at the same time). I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Boston, this morning. I guess I should sign up for Twitter and do a tweet that says, “I’m at Starbucks on Dartmouth Street at Copley Plaza and it’s raining.” But, why would I do that …. W-T-F cares?

b) And, to me, LinkedIn is an “employers” nightmare.

If I was still in business, I’d get a terrible case of heartburn, each (and every) time I found one of my employees on LinkedIn with links to their connections (our customers!, and our competitors’ owners and employees.) If, in the future, I decide to recruit a team of partners to start a countrywide business (that I would put up the funds for, to get underway), using LinkedIn would make it very easy for me to get in touch with people to populate that team of partners. That puts their current employers at risk; would make it too easy for me. What’s the point of LinkedIn anyway? Is it not kind of a Facebook for businesspeople? I can’t imagine that business owners like seeing their employees “out there” on LinkedIn, especially when their employees are “connected” to key customer contacts. I do like that LinkedIn enables me to stay connected to friends (new and old) and I like the “groups” feature, where you can have discussions, with other group members, about issues and such. But, so far, that’s all been “free of charge”, so how does LinkedIn make money off of me?