Last week News Biscuit wrote a spoof article about a man who almost killed himself because of his Twitter addiction. Despite the spoof, at its core lies the incontrovertible addictive nature of Twitter.

Last year countless businesses banned Facebook access due to interminable employee distraction. Why are social networks so addictive? And why aren’t brands benefiting?

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Via the Mashable Twitter Feed comes news of a new life-tool: Inner Twitter. The service sends you a ‘chime’, a meditative phrase for you to ponder upon. It’s up to you whether sign up to receive a ‘chime’ every 15 minutes, every hour or every day… (I suggest starting with the daily chime). When you receive the chime, the idea is that you:

Listen. Pay attention to your breathing. Pay attention to what is before you. Really look at what is in front of you. Forget yourself and become whatever resonates, like stillness, peace or beauty

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JP Rangaswami has been talking a lot about about the way loosely joined up tools and services like SMS, Twitter, TwittyTunes, tinyurl and the Facebook mini-feed can work together. About the way it can be annoying for other people (err, yeah.. sorry to the victims of my BlogFriends feed btw). He has a great way of talking about this emerging Web of Data.

We’re not dealing with firehoses any more. We’re dealing with capillaries, as I discussed in my post yesterday. And these capillaries carry and distribute information nutrients, and process and eject information waste and toxins. The real power of all this lies in the increasing transportability of context.

JP’s found a beautiful way to talk about the potential (and the potential downsides) of the services we use becoming fluid quicker than we can work out how to cope with them.

I played with a new one this evening: Seesmic. It’s a video conversation site, like Twitter but up close and personal. Currently in Alpha, but you can sign up for an invitation. It’s an important one and it’s worth trying out. Be prepared to lose some time.