Not only a Twestival is a great way to meet new tweeple, also tweeting with followers of followers can help to make new connections. I tweet a lot about coffee and had a twitfight last year with a friend about coffee and senseo. I also searched on Twitter for keywords like Nespresso and found the following tweet from @moriesbel;
mm, die Variations van Nespresso zijn echt goed. Geen cheap smaakje, maar echt puur, subliem! Geconfijte gember, mandarijn of caramel. :P :P
I replied that I though it’s not done, drinking coffee that came out of a cup, it reminded me of melted cheese in a cup. Then Maurice replied that he thought so too at first but this coffee was really good and he asked me to come and try. Then we tweeted some more about coffee and haiku’s in Dutch and English. It feels a bit weird that we tried to plan a meeting through tweets as all our followers could read them, and lurkers too. But on 10:40 AM Jan 9th Maurice wrote that he would sent his phone number and address through a direct message (one that only I can read). Already on the way I tweeted about the meeting;
about to leave for an IRL Twitter meet & greet for 2 with @moriesbel (yes, we only met on Twitter)
On the actual meeting itself we pokened and drank coffee and tweeted about it, it was a real tweet-up. We also tried the mandarin coffee Maurice tweeted about a month earlier. Then we forgot about the croissants, “we were so busy that we burnt the croissants that @artgrrl brought with her. so then we took the ‘kaiser brötchen’ rolls (a german name that is) and treated ourselves on (or is it ‘to’?) hazelnut spread (Nutella’s), which was mmm”. I also fell in love with his Latte mento, a machine that makes milk foam for a perfect cappuccino, a few days later I bought one online and so did another friend of mine. We also discussed the kitchen and later I got a reply on Twitter with a link to pictures that the kitchen had been modified. On this tweet-up we had discussions about social aspects on Twitter and escaping the limitations of Twitter like customizing your background to add more information, very inspiring like Maurice tweeted;
Twoffeessants-meet with @artgrrl was not only gezellig, but really inspiring and productive as well.
On our next tweet-up we had coffee and croissants again and discussions about lurking on Twitter and if this is ok or not. When are people just following, when is it lurking and when is it annoying? Is lurking just reading without ever writing a comment or reply, but then what about readers of a blog? Is the purpose of a (micro)blog writing to be read or to receive comments too? We definitely need new descriptions for words like microblogging and lurking, in my opinion a blog cannot be compared with a newspaper because the function to reply is hard to ignore and easy to use. But a reader is not required to reply.
