Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites

An interesting view on our increased fragmentation - Endless Conversation: The Unfolding Saga of Blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Social Sites: “The challenge today is that while the size of individual contributions to online conversations is getting smaller, the frequency of conversations are increasing on these new social media platforms.”
I maintain that while we are currently getting very good at fragmenting our ideas, our identities, our relationships, and our conversations, the real value arises in seeing how the pieces fit. We haven’t had as much innovation in “pulling pieces together” as we have in fragmenting them. Sure, we have sites like Friendfeed, PageFlakes, Netvibes, and others, but they have so far adopted a fairly unoriginal approach to making sense of our distributed selves. Bringing pieces together involves more than bringing them together (ok, that likely doesn’t sound sensible, but it is). Tools that make sense of fragmentation need to provide visualization, unknown connections between elements, peripheral elements of potential interest, history of our own behaviour, etc. I just haven’t seen much that excites me in area yet.