Unified Field theory of Chat

Interesting snippet from Twitter, remarking on how a bunch of people were talking about a TV program they were all watching.

This of course was going to be what Joost et al planned to do to differentiate themselves from Good Olde TV, and of course then mine that good ole' proprietary social network and its interactions to serve relevant Ads.

Ah well, back to the drawing board for them!.

Web 1.0-heads with a knowledge of 'net history will recall the attraction - nay addiction - of chatrooms, Twitter is really just Chatroom 2.0, but the killer app is you can access it on multiple mediums so its easy to use on mobile devices while grazing TV, not just glued to the PC

Very, very interesting - I think there is something fundamental in this - not sure what yet though - but it seems to me that the "light touch" virtual social network technology is weaving itself into real life "unifying activities". Instead of the "social object" (to use the current buzzphrase) - ie the raison d'etre of the service being intrinsic to the service, it is extrinsic.

To (ab)use JP Rangaswami's analogy, when the Twitter "river of drivel" is broken down into these thin capillaries, it starts to have real meaning.