Building the Social Neocortex, or Why Twitter Matters ... A Lot

This image illustrates the people I'm following on Twitter. Each line represents the inputs coming in from one of the 191 people whose tweets I read.

In your minds eye, imagine each of the people I'm following with a similar graph. Then stretch your imagination a little more and envsion hundreds of millions of these relationships being created in just a few years. 

With Twitter we are beginning to build out a social neocortex. The implications -as we've seen in the Middle East- are mind boggling.