Julian Dibbel's phenomenal piece in Wired regarding Twitter is not to be missed. Not only does Dibbel discuss the culture zeitgeist that has become "micro-blogging"; but, Dibbel goes further connect the minuscule messaging medium to something scientific, perhaps evolutionary.

Dibbel asks if we are challenging our brains (like a word version of Sudoku) to relay news in only 140 characters. We must be witty, gain followers and perhaps earn more followers with our insightful 140 character thought on the merits of Wheat Thins over Triscuits.

This particularly struck me, by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.


We've, by using Twitter, thereby made a fleeting observation newsworthy, we've used a new medium to do so and perhaps challenged our fleeting thoughts to think differently.


The Future of Social Media: Is a Tweet the New Size of a Thought?