She enjoyed the wit and sense of humour he displayed in 140 characters or less. He admired her energetic and spontaneous tweets.
For weeks they followed each other's Twitter feeds and then they began messaging each other privately. Soon they were in love and living together in Boulder, Colo. And when they married in March, the ceremony was streamed live on the Internet.
While the marriage of Gwen Bell and Joel Longtine sounds like a futuristic tale fit for the Hallmark Channel, some entrepreneurs hope their story can be duplicated.
A host of Twitter applications are now available for singles, including MyTweetheart, Radaroo and Twitterbirds, which will soon launch a speed dating application. 140Love matches users according to a questionnaire listing their interests, marital status, and location.
The recently launched Flirt140 allows users to search for Twitter users by gender, geographic area and keyword (Canadians are excluded for now). It uses an algorithm to determine gender of Twitter users and claims it's accurate. The site also allows members to send direct messages to anyone on Twitter, whether they are following each other or not.
But some predict it will be a long time before Twitter companies can devise anything that rivals traditional dating sites such as eHarmony or Lavalife.
“I'd rather spend $20 a month and send out a couple of e-mails,” said David Evans, an online dating industry consultant based in Boston. “I'm 40 years old, I don't have a lot of time to be screwing around on Twitter.”
While he's been watching them with interest, he says Twitter matchmaking sites are not nearly as sophisticated at matching up people who have similar interests – or even geographic locations. And so far, he said, companies haven't figured out how to make the applications profitable.
It may sound surprising considering her dating history, but even Ms. Bell, 27, doubts that Twitter dating will gain much steam. Ms. Bell, a social media consultant, says Twitter's biggest draw is its organic quality. She and Mr. Longtine connected serendipitously in October 2007 because they happened to be following a mutual friend's twitter feed.
“Twitter's almost a dating site because it exists,” she said. “It's not trying too hard. It's not setting itself up as this or that platform. You see people meet up on Twitter all the time. It's just another ecosystem, whereas with matchmaking, you're putting yourself out there for a very specific reason.”
She and Mr. Longtine, a 23-year-old computer programmer, still tweet regularly about their lives, but have set some ground rules: no talking about their fights or sex life. Of course, she added, they still “twitter flirt.”
