Last June, I wrote a column for Wired about how Twitter creates “social proprioception” — the ability of a large group of friends and colleagues to know what each other are doing, and to co-ordinate themselves accordingly. Since I wrote that, Facebook’s newsfeed became an bigger new prioprioceptive force amongst friends. Last weekend, I pulled out my mobile phone to check email, and a friend of mine said, “oh, that’s the phone you’re finally loving!” — which was a reference to a Facebook status update I’d published a week earlier, saying “For some reason, I’m now liking my mobile phone, which I used to hate.” This stuff happens all the time now, of course.

But you can tell a trend has truly arrived in the absolute geometric center of the mainstream when it appears in an “Editorial Observer” column in the New York Times. So I was tickled to open today’s paper to read a piece by Adam Cohen that begins thusly:

A co-worker apologized to me recently for being slow on a task. “It’s probably just your insomnia from last night,” I said. She was confused about how I knew, but I reminded her we were Facebook friends, and that she had posted a “status update” about her sleeplessness.

Heh.