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No, it’s common - particularly among people who were on Twitter in its earlier days; 2007-11. A whole lot of people I know came together during those years via
by tomhoward 5y ago
No, it’s common - particularly among people who were on Twitter in its earlier days; 2007-11. A whole lot of people I know came together during those years via Twitter, as well as blogs and offline meetups, but Twitter was the glue that kept people interacting day-to-day, and plenty of those people remain good friends. Indeed I pretty much met my partner over Twitter in 2010, we got together after group social gatherings in 2011 and now we have a wonderful son together.
Things are very different now that it’s so dominated by politically-charged rhetoric and piling on, and I can understand that new social connections would more likely get drowned out these days.
- IshKebab 5y agoPeople who were on Twitter in the early days are definitely not typical.
- tomhoward 5y agoYou could say that about Twitter today; it’s still a small minority of the mainstream population that is on it at all, let alone those who Tweet. But whether it’s IRC, NNTP, Yahoo Chat, LiveJournal, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other online social platform, the practice of finding new acquaintances on the platform then parlaying them into offline professional or personal relationships is not at all unusual. But to your point, early-days Twitter included most people who were into startups, many who were into programming, design, media, even music. Maybe small in number (say, only a few million people) but still significant and influential. I’m conscious that this discussion is essentially becoming a debate over the definition of “typical”, which is rather pointless. The point is that whatever your definition of “typical”, the number of people making offline friends and business connections via Twitter and other online platforms has always been significant.