In his Wired article Clive Thompson writes
When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.
And that is almost enough to get me to try to start Twittering right there. But this is the epitime of the network effect in how useful it is. For me I would need at least my wife and family to keep up to date twittering to get that kind of value out of twitter.
My friends from Gweep have had the Plan-O-Rama for years as the collection of all our .plan files from our shell accounts on a shared unix system our friends grew from a personal BBS from the early 90's pre-web. The earliest archive material was dated March 2002 and I know that we had been using it prior to that because the messages from that day are with well established social routines. It has died off tremendously in the last year or so as Gweeps are busy with other things and their connections to the old shell system become more infrequent.
The Plan-O-Rama did provide a sense of community and just general knowledge about each other. Most of our friends announced engagements and births there and even spread over the country we could feel like we had something to talk about when we came together for those weddings and summer picnics.
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