If you think of Google as the Internet's memory - the process that can access every image, sound and bit of knowledge that a decade of our online existence has generated and stored - then Twitter is its stream of consciousness.
"Stream" has become the standard term for the motley sequence of messages that arrives to you, if you are a Twitter user, from all the people you've chosen to "follow": friends, celebrities, industry luminaries, academics, businesses and so on. Like a stream of consciousness, the "twitstream" contains many kinds of thoughts, as well as a lot of useless half-thoughts, but all of it a reflection of what's on people's minds - right now.
"The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one," said a tweet that came down my stream last week. (A tweet is one of Twitter's short messages - limited to 140 characters.)
Like a thought from the digital overmind - Wildean as it appears to be - the tweet arrived just as I was searching the Twitter pool for messages that contained the phrase "got laid off." There were 50 of them in the previous 24 hours alone.
"Guess who got laid off," wrote a user named deboxi.
"Damn economy," wrote user josephbenninger, after noting his own termination.
Gothicmodel seemed less distraught in breaking her bad news. "Yayyy for unemployment!" she chirped. "Lol ... just looking on the bright side of things."
And that's what Twitter user and human resources consultant Mark Stelzner was trying to do on a recent morning over a bowl of corn flakes.
"It was one of these days where, over the course of the week, more and more job losses had been posted," he told me over the phone from Washington, D.C. Stelzner had amassed a respectable followship on Twitter, about 600 people. "And I thought, 'Well, what would happen if everyone who followed me helped one person find a job?' "
He shared the thought with his Twitter cohort, and they loved it. Later that day, Stelzner fired up a new Twitter account with just that altruistic mission - he called it JobAngels.
Three weeks later, the nascent enterprise has attracted more than 1,700 followers and another 1,000 on related Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
Stelzner has shot out hundreds of tweets from people volunteering their resume-proofing skills, passing along job notices or looking to become full-blown job angels - raising a wing for gig-seekers in need.
