As Mr Ross illustrates above, there's a sudden flurry of interest in 'Social Media Jungle' #smjces and Twitter.
The @rashbre twitter account has been running since February 2007 although in the early days it was like having the only telephone in the village.
Nowadays, it blends some news tickers and general chit chat amongst an entertaining group of people, although self discipline is required to avoid following off along every semi interesting story. I can see that my average posting rate is 1 or 2 posts a day over the last 2 years, but with some increase in recent months.
Because of its speed, there can be a fascination with breaking news stories although realistically a wait of a few hours can often bring a journalism based consolidation. A simple example was yesterday's Apple news. People followed the story in real time but as soon as it finished, Apple loaded their new pages with all of the content directly to their website.
I'm a great believer in 'wide time' (lots of things happening at once) but the compensating 'looking for the long waves' is need to detect any real patterns or stories.
We are also seeing a few of show-biz turning up in these streams now, with Stephen Fry as a fairly long term user and more recently Jonathan Ross (@wossy) appearing along with chit chat about whether his return to television (with Fry) will somehow feature the twitter idea.
Whether these facilities emerge as a sustainable snack-based form of connectedness remains to be seen; I know in my professional world its still relatively uncommon, although I hear that 'www' prefixes were also rare, once upon a time.
