Do you know I have 8 children ?

Well, I don’t. But if I did, by reading my tweets, you would surely know. And if we met, that’s one peculiarity about me you would already know. In fact, you would already know a lot about me. Likely, many of the things you would know after a little while, should we develop a relationship.

Normally, a relationship goes through the following stages: introduction, first chats, a relationship is developing, intimacy, trust, friendship. By using social tools, like twitter, you skip directly past intimacy, and have a shot at developing trust quickly. That’s because you already know the person in front of you, and if all is well, she likely knows you.

When you first meet someone, before developing a relationship, you have to go through the following phases: lowering each other’s defenses, get to know a bit on each other, informally agree to continue talking. That’s why it’s tough - but not impossible, and certainly quite easy with good practice - to develop a relationship with a stranger in less than 5 mins.

But if you know the person’s number of children, what she thinks when she’s traveling, when she’s thinking about deep issues, etc… Then you jump right to the relationship developing stage. Blogs allow that, twitter allows it on another level, more mundane, but at least as important regarding relationships.

Since there’s increasing evidence (see Eszter Hargittai’s Webuse research project) that twitter isn’t taking off among teenagers or event students, if you belong to one of these two groups, think of twitter this way: it’s the wall on your Facebook profile, but a bit more complex, for adults say… JP Rangaswami puts very nicely in this short video interview.

Social media a la twitter, sharing micro-bits of stuff, can be viewed in 2 ways. Useless broken tools to exchange banalities without value. Or intimacy catalysts. The majority of large corporations will of course jump on the first. But the smart ones don’t need help linking intimacy and bottom-line.

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