In sum, what i am saying is this, twitter can help you build relationships over time. I see the 140 chars as a strength rather than a weakness. It is a relatively effortless way of listening to someone’s thoughts and determining whether you want to continue or not. Speed dating comes to my mind (i have not done it, but i have heard about it) as an useful analogy. But unlike speed dating where you only get a couple of minutes to decide, here you can listen to a stream of tweets and then decide. Hope that makes sense?

Thanks for the link. i had not read this particular one, but there are several such articles on what one can do with twitter. i hope i can add some more value to the conversation around twitter than what has already been said. Could be wishful thinking

It has been quite some time since I visited this post. About twitter enabling one to form fine grained relationships, I would term them more as acquaintances (though . It may look like I am talking semantics and nit-picking, but I believe it is important. The interaction I have with certain neighbors are not relationship building (though in some cases it can be). They are important for me to co-exist with others in a normal civil society that involves a certain give and take.

Perhaps a better example would be someone I meet in a train. If I am traveling from Chennai to Bangalore, I would give a polite nod to my immediate co-passengers, perhaps strike up a conversation with a few, get acquainted with them and share some anecdotes. Perhaps, if I am lucky I may find someone with my same wavelength and end up forming a bond and life-long friendship. Now I have built a relationship.

With Twitter and it being what I would term as being open-ended, the focus on relationship forming is not that heavy (atleast IMHO). Yes – if you are lucky, you may end up finding a few people with potentially the same wavelength, but again with it limitation of 140 chars, you are forced to talk in short hand unable to have a back and forth that solidifies the relationship.

While I was looking at Twitter and the ways I can exploit it (a few months back), I came across this site – http://www.doshdosh.com/ways-you-can-use-twitter/. Sorry if I am stealing some thunder from your next post. I agree with some of the benefits, such as networking, branding, feedback etc.

Yes Twitter is clearly good at relationships (that is what i tried to explain via my fine-grained and coarse-grained stuff). You are right, it is also good discovering new content and trends.

Are there other uses? I think yes.

Well, sorry if my comment gave you the feeling that I want to CHANGE the names of the era. I was just mentioning that when I saw the contents of each of the boxes, it occurred to me that they reflected utilities that revolved around information, knowledge and relationships respectively! Was just a perception that I wanted to share…

Regarding Twitter being a relationship building tool, I guess I am only speaking from personal experience because I have ended up meeting new people and hobnobbing with them through quick one-liners – and understanding them better. Not that I have not exchanged thoughts via blog posts as well….but I am beginning to believe that it is easier to get to know a person via something like Twitter as you need not set aside a separate amount of time to read and respond like in the case of blog posts. Twitter just happens (more often than not). And yes, Twitter is definitely not ONLY a relationship builder…!

There are so many Twitter tools out there that the mind boggles. I’ve not tried everything but twitter alerts based on keywords is a great way to find information and people, twitter trends are great to feel the pulse of the online world….and then we have people finding you because of your tweets and then letting you know something you wouldn’t have otherwise known (PULL mechanisms).

Waiting to read your subsequent posts so my own thoughts on Twitter and its consequences are further developed!

Your example of spidergrams is one that most twitterers will resonate with. I have had several learnings like that as well.

Yes i have also started picking up interesting articles from twitter than most other sources. That is one of the big shifts taking place. It is one of the things that made me say that Twitter is making a tectonic shift. More on this in my next post.

Not sure i agree with your categorization that Twitter is mainly for relatioship building. By that token Blogging also is a relationship building thing. Only no one thinks of it that way. Inside the company, blogs have become the social networking platform for people. So it does build relationships. The diff seems to be the coarse-grained and fine-grained i mentioned. Blogging is more coarse-grained and Twitter is fine-grained.

The tectonic shift in my view is due to the fact that Twitter has a lot more uses than relationships alone. What are those? Finding stuff to read you mentioned is one such. But there is more.

Hope to cover it in my future posts.