If a group of people are hanging out in a living room, there is a sense of community even if they are not all doing the same thing; a few might be playing cards, a few might be on a console video game, someone might be reading or web-surfing. But everyone’s in the same room — you can look around and see everyone in a split second.

Twitter, and related apps, seem to do this for the web. It negates the barries created by the huge distances that separate us, because someone can glance at a feed and see what Scoble, or their former work associate, or their co-developer in another country, are up to. It’s sort of a virtual version of glancing around the living room to see where everyone’s at.

Not saying this is exactly what’s going on, or even that it’s especially profound — but I think it’s more this than just being able to follow the minutae of people’s lives. If it were really just about that — well, as you said, “no-one is that interesting”, and then people would have just stopped using it.

Just some ruminations, that’s all.

But I thought I’d take a closer look at it before I dismissed it… I guess we’ll see.