The stream

First, this post (and the ensuing comments) on Pownce vs. Twitter has some enlightening ideas about the future of collaboration apps and the blurring of business/personal boundaries in our lives.

But it was this quote that struck me as really on the mark:

The "stream" -- let's call it that, because "river" just doesn't cut it -- is, like tagging, one of those canonical, web-native inventions that is already so totally fundamental to inhabiting an online social system that its adoption is inevitable in every app that plans to aggregate people in a collaborative networked setting. The stream is to this round of the web what shopping carts were to the last one.

For the book I've been struggling with describing the difference between being "on the shore"--dealing with a reasonably static set of information--and being "in the stream"--immersed in a constant flow of new things.

The shore/stream metaphor seems, I don't know, laboured. But the idea is important because tagging is so well suited for the stream (indeed, it has its roots (ack, mixed metaphor) in the photostreams of Flickr and the linkstreams of Del.icio.us). But anyway, it's one of those things that you intuitively understand when you're "in the stream" but is otherwise kind of hard to explain.