Twitter might seen as a “global connector” now – a borderless, international meeting place – but it wasn’t always so.

New research from MIT suggests that Twitter’s early growth was a result not of the global nature of the internet, but an offline group of people in the US, connected by geography and socioeconomics.
Read more

When Twitter.com goes down, I feel extremely cut off from what’s going on in the world of Twitter. But at least I know that everyone feels this way… today, HootSuite, the popular Twitter dashboard and the one that I personally use most, is down, and I feel very left out of a conversation that I know is still going on.
Read more

Joking aside, there’s a lot of value in this statement.

Twitter is a fantastic way to meet new people. It carefully opens some doors and flat-out knocks down others. You can connect and liaise with clients, colleagues, friends, family, fans, customers (new and old) and, yes, even complete strangers.

You can use the platform for marketing, sales, customer support and after service, or simply to be helpful.

But if you’re doing all this at the expense of the rest of your life then it isn’t social. It’s an addiction.

Apply that same drive and dedication to your offline relationships – professional and personal – and everybody wins.

Find the balance.

(Hat tip: Sickipedia.)