What unique & meaningful value have you gotten out of Twitter?
Twitter is one of the most open, flexible and dynamic communication system ever invented. With such simplicity, it has of course plenty of limitations, but also an unique ability to create lots of powerful connections between its users.
In the spirit of Xmas, would like to share what meaningful connections we have gotten out of Twitter and how we got them, which we think is very difficult to achieve on other platforms.
And of course, we would love to hear what YOU think are meaningful connections!
PS: The more we know about what you think is meaningful, the better we can build our service to facilitate them 
1) Understanding the social circles in our industry
Tim O’Reilly is well networked, generous with information sharing, and most importantly, he is on Twitter 24/7. As such, his Twitter stream was a valuable source of industry information.
Now, with the “Show Conversations” feature in MrTweet, he has also become an invaluable window into the networks he is part of (and which I am keenly interested in).
By seeing clearly what they are discussing, what they are concerned about, etc, I am beginning to understand at a much better level the type of people and conversations happening in his social circles, which is a highly valuable networking resource.
For example, I do not know Mary Hodden, but I can tell easily that Tim OReilly respects her work, since he always retweet her, and John Battelle and Michael Arrington certainly pays attention to her.
2) Valuable Business Relationships
I first discovered @Shayang when we were analyzing Twitter data sets. Looking at his bio, I realized he was the founder of Zoosk, one of the largest dating social networking sites around with 11 mllion users.
Since I had been a big fan of Zoosk (I featured Zoosk quite a bit in my slideshow about discovery), I connected to him on Twitter using the @reply and went for coffee in San Francisco.
Now I chat with him regularly for advice on starting up, catering to users, life in SF etc. And of course, I keep track of all his adventures on Twitter too, including chasing robbers, winning awards and erm, persian dolls.
Discovering, Connecting and Keeping in Touch Via Twitter
3) Uncover Opportunities for Online Collaboration
@KrisColvin and @KarlLong are two examples of great people that we have started working together with for different aspects of MrTweet. While the eventual outcome of the collaborations are no different from typical business collaborations, the reason why these relationships happened is a enormous testament to the power of Twitter in initializing relationships.
Both of them started using MrTweet, and both of them were discussing the pros and cons of our service. We were constantly monitoring the conversations, and we were intrigued by what they were saying about MrTweet. After that, I looked at their Twitter stream and their blog.
It was clear that Kris has a amazing personality, holds her design work with utmost seriousness, and is very open about sharing; Karl had insightful opinions, well thought through pieces, and held powerful experiments. I started chatting with them, and before you know it, we were discussing collaborations.
The open-ness of twitter allowed us to discover them simply because they were talking about us, and the medium allowed us to understand them even before connecting, and then of course touch base easily. There is just no other platform where you would be able to do the same!
Discovering KarlLong via his comments about us, and subsequently initializing a collaboration
Kristi’s blog posting which made me realize what a great lady she was in terms of having and sharing knowledge!
4) Strengthen Existing Relationships
@Tempo is the founder of GetSatisfaction, a great site which we use regularly for purposes of gathering feedback. We had coffee before a couple of times, but it is hard to constantly keep up with each other! But he has now emerged as one of my favorite Twitterers, with his insightful commentary, fun links, and common perspectives.
Having arcane conversations about silly human psychology and beliefs. The funny thing is that we talk much more boring stuff offline.On this point, my favorite quote actually comes from @tonystubblebine (founder at Crowdvine, a pretty awesome networking site). Happens to me all the time!
NYTIMES Quote from Tony Stubblebine
5) Daily nuggets of humor and fun.
Sometimes it is just fun. Personally, I love people who say the darnest things that I would love to say but lack the balls/cred/creativity to say. Here are two of my favorite:
Ever tried “I’m Wil ****ing Shipley* as a promo code?
I wish I could say these damn things and not lose all my followers
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These are the various types of meaningful connections and value we have gotten out of Twitter. We believe these connections are highly unlikely to happen anywhere else - what is your story?
What meaningful connections have you gotten out of Twitter?
Category: Unique Insights