In a world where social media has arrived centerstage because it breaks the wall between community activity and trusted information and allows the best of each to be promoted by the other, why in the world would twitter take the retrograde step of hiding from view public comments from your friends addressed to people you don't know yet? Here's a rundown from ReadWriteWeb of the problem with this (found thanks to tweeting by JayRosen). I'm trying to think of the best analogy for this. A party where no one you didn't know could come? Or one where your friends could bring their interesting friends but you couldn't talk to them or get their phone numbers? Or maybe one where only your friends can come to the party, but they can text with their friends across town? In a comment, Michael points out that strictly-defined twitter "replies," have never been especially…

Greetings from SFO. Am twittering from the NTEN Conference. Shirky on the importance of failure in innovations and adoption. Huge crowd. The Hilton is like a castle keep, palatial but nearly unnavigable.

The traffic on twitter is a good measure of the possibility of total panic over swine flu, and also the attempt by citizen media people to offset hype with information. From Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales, a flu wiki for "calm neutral information:" flu.wikia.com. A Google map of outbreaks ... When I told Rob Stuart that the outbreak is reportedly some hybrid of swine flu and avian flu, he came back in less than 5 seconds with the excellent "So pigs really do fly."