Twice in the last 24 hours I've explained Twitter to friends and family who aren't exactly "early adopters" of webstuff, but who aren't slouches when it comes to staying in touch via facebook, email, etc.. I think these are the third and mainstream wave of adopters and they're starting to hear about Twitter. Arguably, that's because they're in my network and they see my posts on Facebook, which I've configured to update my status with my Twitter feed. "via Twitter" and my occasional tweets about Twitter have 'em wondering. Whether they adopt or not remains to be seen. I recently heard someone at an NTEN WeAreMedia Workshop lead by Beth Kanter describe Twitter as "the sixth sense" - there's a way of seeing the twitter stream as a kind of collective sentience. One way I describe it like having a thousand people blindfolded and poking an object (say, a table). Each of them has their unique perspective, but if you could perceive all thousand perspectives at once, you'd get a pretty good picture of of the object. Streaming communication (as popularized by Twitter and Facebook status updates) is simultaneously extending our collective perception to not only everyone that we're connected to, but everyone THEY'RE connected to, and to some degree, everyone THEY're connected to. That's a lot of connection, and that, to me, is why Twitter, social media, and streaming communication in general occur to me like the emergence of a new kind of Web. If web 2.0 is "web as platform" then it's the ephemeral "stuff" of human connection that happens atop (or within) the platform that will define web 3.0. The emergence of Facebook's status update, Twitter and the like are changing the game, however. Acts of citizen journalism - the reporting of news events from the scene (as seen in two recent plane crash events) suggest that the immediacy and virality of information means that we're becoming more connected than ever. And that, to me is a Very, Very good thing.