I had a phone meeting set up with a new member of an agency's team, someone I've never met. After the obligatory Google, following the Linkedin profile link gave me the official bio and career info. But it wasn't until I looked up his Twitter account that I got to the more human factors. I saw that he joined Twitter a relatively short time ago, that he has posted a few hundred times since then, that he is on a small number of lists, has a small number of friends and even smaller number of followers, and his last post was two weeks ago. This would be a typical example of the average "ham sandwich" Twitter user, but since he's in Internet technology and has been for years, it surprised me. It was even more enlightening to look at the posts, absorb the interests, the level of acumen (how links are shared, use of @, RT, via), the choice of retweets and people he follows. Looking at this, you almost know the person, or at least one or two facets of the personality.

As opposed to Facebook, which will not be so revealing unless you "friend" the person, Twitter gives you a lot of the essentials of "knowing" someone without meeting them, without friending them, and without them knowing you looked at it at all.