Stormy, fragmenting Twitter relationships into subgroups sounds great, certainly if it were to be applied in the same way I used mIRC. What mIRC would do for me as a manager was provide a dashboard into organizational communication. But I’m still very much a novice in my use and understanding of how individuals and organizations might apply Twitter. At the moment it refuses to integrate with Gtalk, and I find I’m not alone in that difficulty.

Are you aware of the “frozen pea” meme that has popped up on Twitter in the past 48 hours? Similar to David Cohn’s request for Craig’s List questions, a group of Twitterers has started a support group for Susan Reynolds, who is facing breast cancer surgery today. The theme is the packages of frozen peas that Susan and others apply to sore parts of their bodies to soothe pain.

Susan Reynolds is @susanreynolds on Twitter and her blog is at http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/boobsonice/. Supporters are posting “Pea-vatars”, or pictures of themselves as pea-avatars on the Flicker group “Frozen Pea Friday” at http://flickr.com/groups/frozenpeafriday/.

I find it amazing that a group of people who have never met Susan, myself included, would rally around her in virtual support. To me, this is the “real” social networking, while Facebook is just window dressing on a much more powerful and global concept.

Thanks for showing us all how to exploit it. It’s been years since I had to file a “one-liner”. Now I get to do it all over again, and for fun!

I think you are right that this kind of openness is still rare - but increasingly it is becoming the norm. Perhaps it’s because I grew up with MySpace and such - to me it seemed perfectly natural to poll my twitter friends - most of whom I know would be interested in asking Craig a question or two.