Kevin Marks has an insightful post about how Twitter works (in theory), noting how the act of following on Twitter is asymmetrical, meaning that you can attend to tweeters who aren’t necessarily your friend. On the other hand, because you can reciprocate, you have the possibility of hanging out with friends, so Twitter can be at the same time a water cooler and an auditorium. I especially like Kevin’s comment that “the key to Twitter is that it is phatic – full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other.”

Both Google and Twitter have little boxes for you to type into, but on Google you’re looking for information, and expecting a machine response, whereas on Twitter you’re declaring an emotion and expecting a human response. This is what leads to unintentionally ironic newspaper columns bemoaning public banality, because they miss that while you don’t care what random strangers feel about their lunch, you do if its your friend on holiday in Pompeii.

I also like his explanation of mutual media:

What shows up in Twitter, in blogs and in the other ways we are connecting the loosely coupled web into flows is that by each reading whom we choose to and passing on some of it to others, we are each others’ media, we are the synapses in the global brain of the web of thought and conversation. Although we each only touch a local part of it, ideas can travel a long way.

Evolution of the social web: while we were thinking about the implications of Google Wave and starting the Austin Google Wave Meetup, Facebook was arranging to buy FriendFeed, our favorite digital lifestyle aggregator. Smart move? Depends how Facebook integrates FriendFeed, but it feels like a helpful crack in the Facebook walled garden. Friendfeed takes feeds from all kinds of content, has useful discussions, and you can upload images and files. It already integrates with Facebook and Twitter. Playing with these tools (and the iPhone) is a realization of our early 2000s vision of the web as an operating system, an environment for many media and many platforms that should, dang it, be interoperable, mashable, jammable. We often say Facebook is the AOL of the 21st century, a walled garden that could fail fast as convergence synapses start to fire across the open web. Facebook has to find a way to hold those eyeballs and rub ‘em against ads, tough to do if people keep walking outside and climbing the virtual trees, getting a view of the bigger World Outside. Buying FriendFeed is like buying a few of those trees, bringing them inside the garden… and maybe the future is in building a few treehouses with telescopes and ads on various surfaces. Hope we won’t see Zuckerberg brandishing a chainsaw.

David Weinberger says Microsoft’s Bing is nothing special, in fact a ripoff of Kayak.com. He references a review by Hiawatha Bray…[Link] He says (making some good points)

opens his review with the clever idea of searching for “google” at Bing and for “bing” at Google. He says Bing gives you a concentrated dosage of stuff about Google, while Google is all over the map with its “bing” results. Well, sure! “Google” is a made-up word with only one dominant meaning, so of course Bing gives you concentrated Google goodness. But “Bing” has lots of meanings, so Google’s right to return a mix of bingy words…with Microsoft Bing as the top result. Now, it is true that, as Hiawatha says, Microsoft gives its “Google” results in convenient tabs about Microsoft the corporate entity as well as listing sub-pages within the google domain, while Google’s top return on “Microsoft” only gives you a set of sub-pages. Microsoft looks more like WolframAlpha in that regard, and that’s a good way to look. But, Google also recently added easier ways to refine and expand searches (by timeline, by WonderWheel), etc., as Hiawatha points out. So, it really depends on what you’re trying to do. As always. (Type MSFT into either and you’ll get similar boxed stock data.)