I had break­fast with an online friend this morn­ing. It was the first time I had met Jas­min Tra­gas in per­son, but it felt like we were just friends and col­leagues catch­ing up for a chat.

We talked kids and spouses, social media, con­tin­u­ous par­tial atten­tion, ambi­ent inti­macy, books and a bunch of other sub­jects of inter­est. It was fun, but unlike what usu­ally hap­pens when you meet some­one for the first time, the com­plex and chal­leng­ing social bar­rier of intro­duc­tion was miss­ing — we just didn’t need it as our online con­nect­ed­ness through tools like Face­book and Twit­ter had already done the hard work for us.

What I mean by this is that through use of social media tools, peo­ple who work around the cor­ner or across the world from each other are able to over­come the chal­lenges around meet­ing and learn­ing about some­one (col­league, friend, some­one who shares an inter­est, what­ever) and jump straight in and do great work, share knowl­edge, have engag­ing con­ver­sa­tions and build rela­tion­ships to a deeper level more quickly. For me, this is one of the key ben­e­fits, if not almost the entire value propo­si­tion of social media.

I expe­ri­enced the same effect at Office 2.0 ear­lier this year, when I was able to phys­i­cally meet a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of the folks I speak and col­lab­o­rate with almost every day. Again, we were imme­di­ately able to engage in mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions and talk in detail about top­ics of mutual inter­est with­out the social intro­duc­tion barrier.

The bar­rier break­down fac­tor is one that I men­tion fairly often in con­ver­sa­tions about social media. When you explain to peo­ple that Twit­ter isn’t just about know­ing when peo­ple are going to the bath­room and Face­book isn’t just about shar­ing pho­tos and com­ments about the week­end bar­be­cue, and couch it in terms of achiev­ing goals in a more effi­cient and speedy way, it can make a dif­fer­ence to build­ing an under­stand­ing of social media value.