Twitter is dead, long live Twitter. Yes I said the words … Twitter is Dead! Why is Twitter dead? Because everybody now knows about it. It died last Friday night I think. It died because my wife said after watching a news report on Twitter, “Twitter – that’s that thing that you do isn’t it?” This was followed by waking up Saturday morning and seeing two articles in the Sydney Morning Herald about Twitter. One of them was on the cover of the Good Weekend! It didn’t stop there. Sunday Morning comes and there’s a story about a struggling Sydney artist. She achieved fame when one of her obscure drawings was identified as the “Fail Whale”. This morning was the final blow. Channel Nine ran a story on the Morning Show and they now have an account.
How will we know that it’s the end for Twitter? Five signs to look out for;
- The masses see the value in the coffee mornings at Single Origin and it is taken over in a hostile bid by Gloria Jeans.
- @Stilgherrian’s sense of humour and pithy comments vanish as he spends all day writing friendly hello notes to new followers.
- @ev and @biz succumb to constant tweets from @fakerupertmurdoch and sell just as Twitter overtakes Google as the most popular website
- John Howard will open an account as a precursor to his long awaited comeback
- @KevinRuddPM will close his account and introduce a new tax on Twitter users to curb excessive use by young people
Goodbye good friend, I for one will miss that slightly obnoxious snobbery of being a Twit when nobody else was!
One for the Tweet Spotters … every single sentence in this blog except this one is under the mandatory Twitter count of one hundred and forty characters.
Tiphereth said
The familiar lament of the early adopter, I believe there is hope no matter how much mainstream reportage Twitter gets. Unlike most new interweb trend bandwagons Twitter requires sustained effort and levels of comitment most people are not capable of sustaining. There will be masses signing up and abandoning Twitter after the first day or so because it doesn’t just lay it all out and make it easy like Facebook. The main consideration of Tweeting to people they don’t know is completely foreign to the average person. So I think the Twitter early adopters are safe in a Twitter bubble for a while longer at least
Melanieh said
You beat me to the punch but i agree. I am waiting for a flodd of celebrity watching to fall over each otheri n the rush to register just so they can see updates from brittany spears and ashton kutcher. On the bright side, if they are buy doing that they are not following me. Still the specialness is gone : ( I know this because my 70 year old mother thrust the goodweekend at me and said there is an article in here on twitter, you’ll want that won’t you and she, the luddite knew what it was all about (sigh).
Colin Campbell said
I am not so pessimistic, but I agree with your comments.
Ben said
All the laments a day after Twitter turns three…You know its going mainstream when even diehard magazine editors like Madison & FHM start tweeting.
Venturebeat has a nice potted history cum user experience of the service at: http://venturebeat.com/2009/03/21/twitter-trounces-the-terrible-twos-turns-three/
angelene said
I believe the term is Mainstreaming and anything losees it’s shine after so much overexposure ..like Paris Hilton, Von Dutch. (Ed Hardy in a few months time too)
There are sites like http://favrd.textism.com/ that keep my faith alive in twitter because these people are just so damn funny. They are clever and even better that I can keep my relationship with them on a fabulously superficial level and still feel a weird kinship….a camararderie even.
You’ll come back to it in a while – you just need to deal with the fact that you feel like your good ol friend Tweet is cheating on you.
Gavin Heaton said
It will need to be more than a hostile takeover for Gav to hand the keys to Gloria Jeans. It would need to be a fullscale invasion
But the best thing about twitter/social media is that more is more. And anyway, it’s not the quantity of conversation, it’s the quality.
In a time of homogenized thinking diversity can only be a good thing! Bring on the deluge.