Twitter, Facebook, and other evolving social systems feed into our “ambient awareness,” which is, according to Clive Thompson in the New York Times Magazine, “very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does - body language, sighs, stray comments - out of the corner of your eye.” Thompson’s written a clueful article about computer-mediated sociality and its impact on self- and other-perception. Read his article, and you’ll “get” Twitter and, beyond that, begin to understand that the social web is transforming communications in a way that oddly restores the kinds of social relationships that existed before we had to “would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor - a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.” Now we have a way to sustain social ties, almost aggressively, and we have another adjustment to make - to a world where privacy is limited and our actions online form a persistent and somewhat inescapable sense of who we are. Thompson concludes on a positive note - we begin to know ourselves better:

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another - quite different - result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site - “What are you doing?” - can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

More on Twitter here:

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang posts how he uses Twitter (my list would be similar, how about yours?).

Owyang (on Twitter, naturally) points to a Business Week article by Shel Israel, “Getting Intimate (with Customers) on Twitter,” which talks about Ricardo Guerrero’s success using Twitter for Dell.