As soon as Hylton – my brilliant publisher – has worked his technical miracles – we will be offering you the first Fast Forward Blog Guide. It will be all about Twitter – what it is, how it works, what it is doing and where it may be taking us. More on that later. Right now I would like to share with you the biggest take away I got from this assignment.

Twitter enhances our ability to groom and to be groomed. So what does this mean?

It is this. I am reminded that we are Primates. The curse of being a Primate is that we have a social imagination. Zebras only worry about Lions when a lion is attacking them. We worry about stuff all the time. Where am I on the slippery pole? Will I keep my job? Does she like me? As a result, we get flooded with stress.

The way that all primates reduce their stress is that they Groom. By grooming they add oil to the society they live in and they cement alliances and deepen friendships. Baboons groom physically.

As primates, tThe best way for us to reduce stress is to groom as well. We call it hanging out, gossiping and cozying up with our friends. That is not how the workplace works. Hanging out with friends etc is a no no. Worse the workplace supports stress downloading. Your boss dumps on you. You dump on a colleague. Worse, you may now have no job or tribe and be on your own – no downloading and no grooming at all. You are in that worst of all places as a primate – on your own. You have too much time and you can fill it by worrying.

What I have started to see is that Twitter’s deep power is that it enables us to groom both at work and when we are on our own. It enables us to establish that small group of people who we offer friendship too and who love us back. All in a way that is not icky.

I think that it is this feature and this small group that then enables us to communmcate directly to the ends of the Twittersphere. For there is a pathway opened up along the route of trust and love.

So all the talk about authority and size of groups of followes is imprecise. The key is to have nurtured this small group of groomers.

If all this sounds like hogwash here is the expert Robert Sapolsky: