Social Time has a lot of meanings (ie: Social Time In The Life Of A Man And Society where "..social time-the peculiarities of the Past-Present-Future in social processes, and their unbreakable connection) or Social Time as SOCIAL RHYTHMS, CYCLES, and CLOCKS where "..Members of work groups, for instance, cross the temporal boundary between family and work when they "punch in" at the company time clock".

Definitions of Social Time, before the Internet was really widely adopted and used were discussed in A Very Social Time  about social life in  social life of literate working people in antebellum New England; but it doesn't really address the use of "Social Time" as I mean it.  Also, Simonetta Tabboni discusses The Idea of Social Time in Norbert Elias "….. Elias's definition of time enables us to understand that dominant time, which varies historically according to different kinds of society, expresses the need for an organization of work and reflects above all each society's privileged values. Social time always results from a choice…".

My idea of "Social Time" is much closer to SiliconValley.com's recent post - How can I miss you if you won’t go away? where:

"….Now it’s practically a given that your time online is social time. Between commercial and peer pressure, you’re expected to maintain both a public presence for general interaction and a semi-private sphere for friends and family, both updated in real time with your activities, opinions, latest interests, location, and cultural tastes. The vehicles for this presence were homepages at first, then blogs, and now the widget-laden profiles on the social networking sites, along with an endless flow of pinging, poking and tweeting. It’s sort of funny that a system built by notoriously socially awkward geeks has turned into a mammoth, never-ending cocktail party. But that’s where we are, and right now, billions are being bet on monetizing the world of constant acquaintanceship.

Some people think we can build on Social Time and improve it's quality by data-mining your email such as Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/WriteWeb :

"…. “The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by e-mail. The big players won’t put a major push into building a new social network,” he writes. “Your e-mail account isn’t valuable because it’s got the e-mail addresses of other people who could be solicited commercially — it’s valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you.” And Larry Dignan at ZDNet wonders what the future looks like for any but the biggest social networking specialty sites: “Increasingly, social networking is looking like a feature more than a business. There will be big ramifications to consider as social networking becomes integrated into your everyday applications.”

I was kinda thinking of Twitter lately - as I've tried to get into it more - I still don't really use it like many are now doing, but I noticed a friend's tweet the other day of being in a traffic jam outside of Philadelphia and a recent visit to New York, and wondered just how much I really wanted to know about people's lives.  

Does anyone really want to know what I'm doing right now (I'm actually blogging right now, can't you tell)?   I think, personally, that knowing what someone does or is doing, should come more as a form of "permission marketing" rather than a broadcast "tweet".

The Web Analytics Association is currently working on set of Web 2.0 definitions, it is more and more appearing that my own committee, Social Media, will work with the Standards Committee to define Social Media Standards, and I think we should also define "Social Time" and how it would be measured.