Thanks for revisiting this Marshall. And I am enjoying myself at Connectbeam. One memorable article that came out since this was originally posted was Clive Thompson's piece in the New York Times Magazine, Brave New World of Digital Intimacy (http://bit.ly/1GTlq0). In it, he describes another value from all the noise we consume on tools like Twitter. Here's a relevant quote: "But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before." Social scientists call this ambient awareness. I'd add another geeky term, apophenia, described in Wikipedia as: "Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data." One is more person-centric, one more event- or trend-oriented. But both share the idea that consuming the noise lets patterns emerge that you wouldn't otherwise see. - Hutch Carpenter from FriendFeed MT Plugin