Cathy Davidson recently posted her thoughts about rapid change and the unpredictability of the near future, and linked "The Twitter Guys", and article in a recent New York Times about the founders of Twitter and how it expanded at a rate of 1,382 percent, with traffic increasing 43 percent since Oprah joined in April.

"Five years ago, I knew a few people who didn't use e-mail. If someone had a cell phone, it was only for emergencies. Everyone had a landline phone.

Five years ago, my work email in-box wasn't very full, because not many people used it. My daughters were the only ones that "IM'd" or texted me. No FaceBook, no Twitter.

Things are different now.

More people are comfortable with technology. My dad's 80-something friends send me e-mails. We establish our on-line social networks, connecting with relatives and friends, old and new, by sharing our e-mail contact lists with on-line networking services. Our contact lists are getting longer, too, as many of us have more than one e-mail address.

Six degrees of separation? No. In many cases, it is more like 3 or 4"

After I posted my comment to Cathy's blog, I checked my e-mail and discovered a link to another NY Times article about tweets, dated 4/16/09, by Virginia Heffernan: Let Them Eat Tweets: Why Twitter is a Trap

I especially liked her perspective:

"The ?ambient awareness? that Twitter promotes ? the feeling of incessant online contact ? is still intact. But the emotional force of all this contact may have changed in the context of the economic collapse. Where once it was ?hypnotic? and ?mesmerizing? (words often used to describe Twitter) to read about a friend?s fever or a cousin?s job complaints, today the same kind of posts, and from broader and broader audiences, seem . . . threatening. Encroaching. Suffocating. Twitter may now be like a jampacked, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another?s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists (who coined ?ambient awareness? to describe this sense of physical proximity) but has become stifling to those in the middle of it."

In her article, Heffernan mentioned something called "Twistori". Intrigued, I immediately rushed to the site. If I want, I can watch streaming tweets from strangers 24/7 on my computer screen, and lets you filter tweets by feeling words. The application was inspired by WeFeelFine, something that I blogged aboutlast year.