Social networking sites are turning out to be a good way to locate long lost kin. About two weeks back news broke of a British father and son that were reunited via Facebook after 37 years, and more recently two American brothers who have found each other via Twitter. 
 
“I have a routine of checking my e-mail, Twitter and Facebook before bed each night, just in case something happened during the evening that I didn’t catch,” Matthew Keys told Mashable. While Keys was on Twitter one evening, he saw a message from someone called Adam Smith that read: “hey is your mom’s name jackie?”
 
Keys recognised Smith as someone that he has been in contact with before. “Adam and I actually met in a web forum,” he said. “Neither of us can remember exactly how we came to meet, but we kept in touch off and on over the past year on MSN and Skype.”
 
After seeing the message on Twitter, Keys contacted Smith via Skype. “He started telling me things from my childhood that I had heard bits and pieces of growing up - things nobody could have possibly known,” Keys said. “I gave him my cell phone number and told him to call me. After a few minutes talking on the phone, it became pretty clear to both of us that he and I were related."
 
Smith knew that his father had other children, as his mother informed him about them a few years earlier and one of the names she mentioned to him was Matthew Keys. “At some point, Adam started asking his mom and our dad about me and something in him pushed him to ask me on Twitter details about my biological mom,” Keys explained. It was easy for the two to arrange a face to face meeting as they live a mere 10 minutes drive from each other. 
 
In related Twitter news, Britney Spears has knocked Ashton Kutcher off his perch as the Twitter user with the most followers. Spears currently has over 4 000 more followers on Twitter than Kutcher, with both of them just shy of the five million mark.

Pic: Mashable