Small World: How do we know the people we know?

My good friend and lightning co-farmer Brendan Dunphy was one of the select group of people who bullied me to look at Twitter way back, when I was convinced it wasn't for me. Of course, Brendan was right – as he is about everything, darn him. Twitter's perfect for me, because I can't shut up. And because I'm nosy. And because I like bumping into new people.

I've met a bunch of new people through Twitter. Not by trying to describe myself, or by looking for points that I have in common with other people – but by starting conversations, and joining in conversations.

How do I know the people I know outside of Twitter? Through shared experience. I went to school with them, I worked with them, I danced with them in a cage in a sleazy warehouse joint in Budapest – the usual sort of thing. We found ourselves occupying the same patch of earth at the same time, and we got talking.

But the data stream generated by Twitter hints at tantalising new possibilities for making connections. A couple of weeks ago, I hooked up with Brendan for a coffee. He was going on to an event run by NESTA, the UK's leading light in innovation. That evening, as I thumbed through my Twitter feed, I noticed that another guy I follow was tweeting from the very same event.

Not surprising? I mean, if I'm into researching and writing about innovation, surely people I know are going to cluster at the same waterholes? But the thing is, the person tweeting from the NESTA event wasn't part of my “innovation” cloud. He's in my follow list because I found him, at random, on the public timeline, where Twitter presents a real-time sample of current tweets. And I was interested in him because he was tweeting about a train service I use. When I looked through his past tweets, I got the impression that he and I were, so to speak, fellow travellers. I wanted to follow his train comments – because I've often thought I'd like to see inside the heads of other commuters. (They don't say what they're really thinking when they use their mobile phones. They say: “I'm on the train”, and “Mummy really wants you to have your bath, darling”.)

My dilemma is: do I introduce these two people to each other? Fans of networking say I should – that I must. My more rational self points out that this pair could have met each other IRL at the waterhole – they don't need me to matchmake.

I haven't connected Brendan with my train-travelling friend, and for a very good reason. I don't know what they would talk about. I need more than a coincidence of place to create a genuine connection between two other people. I learned this last summer when I introduced the only two people I'd ever met who'd been to Antarctica – and they had nothing to say to each other. (“Cold, innit?”)