Today I gave a presentation on the fairly wide ranging topic of ‘Twitter – time waster or value adder’ at Olympia. Essentially I replayed the arguments against, which can be summarised as the ‘pointless tweets’ argument, and the numbers one.   And gave five reasons why Twitter can be productive, or indeed essential.

The third was all about how Twitter can strengthen and extend your real-time relationships.   I can think of plenty of examples where I’ve got to know someone via Twitter and paid attention to the way they express themselves and what they talked about, before making a call on whether this is someone I’d like to meet in real life or not.

For instance – the number two at Cow Digital, Louise, is someone who I ‘met’ on Twitter.   When Louise applied for a job, I already knew enough about her that her CV was almost incidental to the process.   And based on that experience any future hirings will ideally happen the same way.

Secondly the other day, Canadian gallery owner Amrita Chandra put out a tweet asking if myself, Ben Kunz (of Thought Gadgets / Media Associates) and Darryl Ohrt (of Plaid / Brandflakesforbreakfast) would be at SxSW.

Being local to each other, Darryl and Ben know each other well, but Amrita and myself have never met them in person, or indeed each other.  Having communicated via Twitter for more than the past year however, we’ve already decided that we’re people who’d like to meet.

Twitter, a good way to filter out all the incidental chit chat, or indeed the awkward silences?   Perhaps someone should take the idea one stage further and start Twitter speed dating! (OK, or perhaps not)