Tweetup to Meet Your Twitter Friends

(FOX 25 / MyFoxBoston.com) - Gretchen Kinder’s Twitter name is Clownface3 . Trish Fontanilla’s Twitter name is TrishoftheTrade . Almost every day, these two share just about everything in a sentence or two.

“I know she has cats,” Trish says. “I know who she’s dating.”

“I am pretty sure her favorite restaurant is Myers and Chang,” Gretchen says of Trish.

But the thing about this friendship is that Gretchen and Trish have never met in real life. In fact, they once sat only feet apart in a restaurant, but at the time, neither of them knew it.

Gretchen and Trish met on Twitter. Unlike Facebook, you don’t need an invitation to connect with someone. Just follow them, and if they are interested in what you have to say they will follow back.

“You can be a little more daring, I guess, in who you connect with,” says Jeff Cutler, a social media specialist who operates his own website, jeffcutler.com. Cutler says on Twitter, people will often connect with others outside their comfort zone. When someone tweets 10, 20, even 100 times a day, it’s easy to learn a lot about them. People can communicate directly by tweeting back and forth.

“On Twitter, you can sort of open yourself up more because of the anonymous nature of it. I think that also tends to build up relationships a little bit. I know I have a bunch where I have met people through friends on Twitter and when you see them you already know them,” Cutler says.

When we brought Trish and Gretchen together at the Diesel Café in Somerville, they didn’t skip a beat. A friendship made out in the Twitterverse, quickly grounded in real life.

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