In January 2009 I was in Beijing in order to prepare the Chinese New Year dinner arrangements for ASIA-XL together with Yin Sigan. For him it was the first encounter with twitter. During that week for example we met with @davidfeng and had dinner. Sigan was amazed how twitter could make the world so small. 

Later that evening I got a message via twitter from another Dutch guy, also in Beijing. @JaccoBouw started to follow me, asking whereabout I stayed in Beijing and if perhaps there would be time to meet. At that moment our schedules didn't allow it because he had to go to Shanghai, so he told me. Later that week we also wanted to go to Shanghai where we scheduled to meet with different people, also with Marc van der Chijs @chijs - In fact he is the one responsible for all of this. I was reading an article in a Dutch newspaper about him then decided to check his blog on the web and found him live tweeting about the opening of the Beijing 2008 games. You can check I joined twitter on 8-8-8 during that opening ceremony. - Anyway it is clear that I would never have met him IRL if not for twitter.

Because of our trip was bringing us to Shanghai I sent a message to @jaccobouw and we arrange for a lunch meeting. During that lunch meeting we, Maarten van der Dussen - partner in @productip, and I met with @Jaccobouw and his general manager Jay. The food was good, the stories where nice and @jaccobouw explained us about his company webpower, becoming one of the largest in the world on e-mail marketing (legit - not spam !).

The most amazing thing was that we found that his company was not a mere 5 minutes away from our company in the Netherlands. Thanks to twitter dutch people have found each other in Beijing, met for coffee and lunch in Shanghai and have done business together in the Netherlands. 

Cas't away