Meetups, FroM page 1:

SOME USE STRATEGY TO GET OUT OF THEIR SHELL

even as the odds of having something in common with their tens of thousands of followers grow impossibly long.

“There was an openness at the beginning of Twitter because it was just the techies and other techies,” said Kate Gardiner, an audience engagement specialist who started attending tweetups as a journalist in 2008. “Now it’s between the trolls and God knows what else.”

Still, some people insist the practice remains worthwhile, for both them and the people who respond. Chalk it up to road weariness, careerism, an aversion to being alone or life as an extrovert, but those who still send such invitations are road-testing the old job-hunting adage that everyone is worth meeting at least once. Results have been mixed. Stories abound of business partners, friends, employees, clients and love connections found. Comedian Dan Nainan first met Shankman in a Starbucks along with 30 other people who responded to a tweet, and Nainan soon found himself with a oncein-a-lifetime gig.

“Because of Peter, I got this booking where I was flown to Palm Beach, to Donald Trump’s golf course,” he said. “Trump was there, and I persuaded him to come watch me, and I got a great picture with him as well.”

Gardiner, who still sends such open invitations now and then, has met “a slew of folks” this way, from “an ex-boyfriend to thesis advisers and, of course, business partners,” she said. Though those benefits can sometimes seem beside the point.

“I spend so much time in hotels these days that I’ll do just about anything to get out of there and hang out with people,” she said. “Even I’m getting sick of just me.”

But the invitations have yielded plenty of “creepsters,” too. “Being a woman on the Internet leads to people being very comfortable with you too quickly,” she said. “Some guys are just a little too willing to sit too close to you at the bar and tell you their troubles.”

How does she deal with it? “You just have to keep repeating to yourself: ‘I’m having an interesting life experience,’ ” she said. “‘Perhaps I’ll learn something.’” These days, she makes sure two or three people she knows well will be present before sending any open invitations.

But planning ahead can be antithetical to the whole enterprise. Baratunde Thurston, the author of “How to Be Black” and a former writer for The Onion, beganpostingopeninvitationson Twitter and Facebook as a matter of efficiency. “I would go to a city like San Francisco, and there was no physical way to have oneon-one connections with everybody I would like to encounter,” he said. “How many coffees can you grab?” Instead, he would announce his presence at a local bar or coffeehouse with a promise to stay put for a few hours.

But like a high school student just trying to have a couple of friends over, Thurston, who is relatively well known from his Onion days (he has 170,000 Twitter followers), soon found that his invitations would get away from himthroughsharesandretweets, resulting in large crowds of unfamiliar faces.

“It became a little bit of a petri dish where 15 people might show up throughout a three-hour window and I might get to talk to six of them,” he said. “But it wasn’t like nine people just waiting to talk to me doing nothing. They’re talking to the other people. So people made friends, people went on dates, people launched businesses. All from this very informal thing.”

Most people who send such invitations are, not surprisingly, extroverts. “I’m powered by people,” Thurston said. “I get more creative around more people. I get energized by them.” Such is Shankman’s compulsion to socialize that he once started a website called AirTroductions to help airplane passengers find other people to sit and chat with during flights.

Others have used the invitations as a cudgel to force themselves out of their shell. “I was pretty shy growing up,” said Runa Sandvik, a technologist with the Freedom of Press Foundation in Washington. “I would rather stay at home and watch television than go out and try and meet people.”

So when she moved from a small city in Norway to London, then to Chicago, and found herself traveling a dozen times a year, she began tweeting notice of her arrival in new cities to ensure she wouldn’t stay holed up in her hotel room. “If you’re going to be traveling a lot but prefer to be alone, it’s going to be really sad and boring at times,” she said. “I felt like it was something I almost had to force myself to do.”

Sandvik can now point to tangible benefits. In November, after announcing her arrival in Oslo, rather than attract a dinner companion, she ended up giving a lecture on digital encryption tools to a group of journalists.

But even the most gregarious people have their limits. Thurston found himself reconsidering the wisdom of tweetups after suffering through an intimate dinner with a woman “who was just very strange,” he said, diplomati- cally. “Not threatening or violent, just socially on a different part of the spectrum.”

“That was like, hmm, there is some risk in opening yourself and saying, ‘I’m going to be at this spot at this time,’” he said.

Responding to these invitations carries risks, too. A few years ago, Julia Lynton-Boelte, a life coach from Vashon, Wash., showed up at a park in Oakland, Calif., after a Facebook friend she barely knew invited all her followers to come celebrate the completion of her most recent art project, a giant, heart-shaped pillow.

“She wanted all her friends to show up and bring a pillow,” she said. “So I drove to the park with this pillow, which is an awkward thing to do, right? You can’t really play it off like, ‘Oh, I always bring my pillow to the park.’”

Lynton-Boelte soon realized the invitation wasn’t as open as it seemed. “I definitely was not expected at that party,” she said. Perhaps, she guessed, the artist just wanted to brag about her art project but felt more comfortable couching it in a faux invitation. “I had to make the best of a bad situation.”

The lesson? “If you have hundreds of friends on social media, you’re writing to hundreds of people,” she said. “Even if you think you’re only writing to 20.”