On Twitter.

"It has been said that to write is to live forever."
- Tina Fey

"The man who wrote that is dead."
- Steve Martin

Those of you who follow obsessively the lives of this blog's three authors (so, basically, the authors themselves plus or minus Cynthia Princi xoxox) know that we've all recently begun to use the micro-blogging service Twitter. A bare-bones social network, Twitter assigns each of its members a webpage (for instance www.twitter.com/imsoftness) that displays the user's posts, each of which is famously (or infamously) limited in length to 140 typed characters. How many is that? This little paragraph has 510.

Unless the user locks his or her updates, anyone can view anyone else's updates. But like any good network, you don't need to visit every user's micro-site to see what's up: Twitter's homepage automatically collates and streams the updates from users you "follow."

Sound maybe like Facebook status, but with an arbitrary limit, and which you doubtless already have and ignore? You're not alone, but I disagree. I'm going to argue that Twitter's value greatly outdistances Facebook's, and that its presence signals the beginning of a turning point in human interaction. Twitter's value lies in the fact that it's designed for mobile use, it provides real-time access to information, and it creates a novel and meaningful kind of social relationship.

Designed for mobile

Lots of services these days boast a "mobile version." Yankees.com shows video footage of the game if you're at your desk; but if you're on the go and don't have a fast connection, you can view the mobile version of the site to grab the game score and the latest news.

Twitter doesn't have a mobile version. It is simply mobile. In fact, its seemingly silly 140-character limit is born out of Twitter's founders' wanting updating from your phone to be as easy as updating from the Web (SMS messages are limited to 160 characters, and displaying someone's username and a timestamp typically takes about 20 of those; 140 are left to the user).

It's the difference between "made for mobile" and "made to work on mobile" that makes Twitter location-agnostic. For instance, Gmail's great, and its iPhone platform is pretty nifty. But given the choice between answering an email now or answering it much more easily from home, I choose the latter. By equalizing the experience from the supercomputer to the Startac, Twitter creates an incentive to share exactly when sharing makes sense.

Access to new -- and new kinds of -- information: search.twitter.com

Real-time sharing enables real-time search. Real-time search avails us of a kind of information generally withheld from public consumption. Some at Google call it the "tacit," as opposed to "codified," information.

Codified information is, basically, facts. In conversations, not knowing a fact has become obsolete. The phrase "I don't know, period" has been summarily replaced by the phrase "I don't know, but I'll look it up right now." (Note: no one cool has ever said "period" out loud.)

Want to know the wording of the second amendment to the Constitution? The text is available online. Unsure at what time The Office is on? Same deal.

Google and the mobile Web can't answer every question, though. What if it's 9:04, The Office just started, and your question is "Is the show good tonight?" Right now, Google can't help you. To answer the earlier questions, there are official online repositories that make a living aggregating critical formative documents -- like the US Constitution. Or TV Guide.

Whether a four-minute old show is "good" is a question of opinions. It's tacit information, and it's only existed for 240 seconds. Enter Twitter, which can answer that question without a problem. Search on Twitter for "the office" and you'll see everyone everywhere who "tweeted" about it. Sure: not every 140-character bloviation is reliable, but you read more than one, and trends emerge. And because your sources, as it were, can update easily and from anywhere, getting lots of opinions quickly is rarely a challenge.

Your new "best friend"

Figuring out whether The Office is good is only the most trivial use of access to real-time info. As big a fan of Twitter as I am, I readily admit that good, usable information isn't always available on its search. Lots of tweets are about what your roommate ate and feels guilty about. Or the latest book your friend is claiming to have read to try to sound smart.

But you can be sure that more and better information is coming. Already we're discovering we have access to information we never thought we would. We can with some confidence answer questions like "Even though the Department of Traffic says they're ticketing anyone who parks on the grass at Coachella, is it really being enforced?" Or even "do you think it will be enforced?"

When we ask these kinds of questions, we allow to evolve our traditional understanding of a reliable source. The person I trust the most on Earth is Sara (followed very closely in a tie by Lia and Austin Sarat). But when I need to know whether the line at Chili's is out the door, the person I "trust the most" is the person who's there, tweeting. The person with the information I need -- previously completely unavailable to me -- is now briefly but critically part of my social network.

All of a sudden, the "social network" is more than our meaningless list of 500 Facebook "friends." In some sense, gathering information this way lets "social" mean social again. Humans are social creatures. Our survival and advancement throughout history have been tied to our ability to collaborate. Twitter gives us the ability to do better -- at literally anything -- by leveraging the information our fellow humans have stumbled upon. That's not a new thing! This concept of everyone making decisions with equal access to all the information in the world -- the tacit and the codified alike -- is often referred to as the age of information or the social Web. Some also call it democracy.

And so in closing (and at long last) I stress that "going social" doesn't mean amassing a longer list of iPhone Apps. It's not a joke or a fad or a bubble; it's simply what we've always done. Twitter may not itself be the next big thing, but if you don't find a way to share and to learn, you will be left behind.