I’ve been listening to several of Leo’s podcasts over many years now.  His TWiT podcast has proven to be essential listening for me at the gym.  So when Leo started TWig – This week in Google (and the Cloud) – I new it would be worth downloading.

Take for example This Week In Google 4: Filers vs. Pilers, it’s probably one of the most accessible of the current series.  The cast is usual suspects: Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, Jeff Jarvis and the guest, for this session, Kevin Marks (Google: Open Social, and now BT).  It’s talking heads at its best.

Kevin introduces the word phatic, a social scientist term, in relationship to much that is Social Media.  According to Kevin, Social Media is “full of social gestures that are like apes grooming each other.”  That is, full of expressions that only function to perform a social task, rather than to conveying information.

Other nuggets from TWig#4 are that:

• there is a limit (i.e. accessible by API) of 3200 tweets on Twitter
• Google Wave, is best viewed as tool that will support collaborative editing of a stored document – rather than a new email paradigm (Kevin)
• TWig’s has a friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/twit-twig