Right, but the question is, who gets listened to when it comes to norming, and who is listening? Suppose I make a normative statement ("Your apps really shouldn't be posting to Twitter") -- who listens to me? You could frame it in terms of networks; the people who I share reciprocal follower relations with (my strongest ties) are probably the most likely to agree. And to the extent that we have common alters who share that opinion, locally-dense parts of the network are likely to coincide with different norms. Note the huge homophily/influence problem here, as elsewhere. But I also think that thinking of networks can be counterproductive when what we want to think about is groups. Even though Twitter doesn't have group boundaries built into the technology, I still think that groups exist, and we'd do well to acknowledge that. The problem is that all the groups are streamed together, and when groups have contradictory norms about what is ok to post, participants are faced with an impossible decision. This can be interesting analytically because as a researcher you can observe how people prioritize their groups, but as the participant, it can be a struggle. The recent Facebook trend of taking surveys ("Which X are you") -- which happily seems to have died down -- is another good example. Groups who use Facebook for purely recreational reasons might be more comfortable with this (taking surveys is a key part of what FB is _for_) and people who use it as a less formal version of Linked In might be less comfortable with it. It's tempting to look at Twitter and see nodes! edges! It's a network! But I like the idea of stepping back and seeing it as an overlapping of groups that are still bounded, but by glass walls. Scott PS. My first post didn't make it (sent from scott@redlog instead of aoir@redlog) Here it is: I would add #4, play. Recently, I have personally enjoyed #internetbeatles and #robotpickuplines, for example. It's frivolous and fun, but frivolity and fun are important parts of life too, right? Rather than worrying about people who tweet mundane things, the more pernicious threat is applications that use Twitter for broadcasting users' in-app status updates, such as their current level in the spy game. I have complained this in the past, and I only see it getting worse as more and more apps (especially mobile ones) realize they can free ride on Twitter as a channel for notifications. This suggests to me that Twitter apps are going to have to become more like email clients. I want better filters for users, topics (#hashtags), better threading, and archiving. It would be interesting if, in addition to email, newsgroups and RSS feeds, email clients started making Twitter an option. Thunderbird's open source - anyone want to collaborate on building Twitter support into it? PS. peanut butter sandwich, chocolate milk and a double espresso.