I Didn't get Plagarized This Time, But....

By: T.R. Slyder, TRSlyder@yahoo.com


My Twitter prophecy may be coming true! If this well-written piece is any indication, I may be proved correct in less time than I thought!

The latter talks about how played-out Twitter has become now that so many celebrities (and pseudo-celebrities) are on Twitter, and just use it to hock their goods. Confounding that further is the discovery that several celebrity Tweeters had ghost-Tweeters.

It's a neat concept and has its rightful place on the internet. I just think that place is shrinking.

UPDATE: I just realized what this Twitter phenomenon reminded me of. You know when you were like 12 and everyone had a nickname? Then eventually someone would do something foolish, like fall on their ass while rollerblading, then check your ass and realize you have a huge scrape now on your ass, and one of your friends would be like, "Nice job Rollerblade ass. OH MY GOD!! Ha Ha Ha, that is TOTALLY your new nickname! From now on everybody, his nickname is "Rollerblade Ass"!! Oh man, you will be the laughingstock of the school, Rollerblade Ass!"

100% of the time anyone ever says, "Oh man, that's your new nickname!" it won't be. The kiss of death is saying that. Real nicknames are organic, and start out more quietly and eventually ascend to permanence. I've given out more nicknames than anyone else I know, and I know that to be true.

The media's insitance that Twitter was the wave of the future, struck me as reminiscent of the instance shown when friends insist on your new nickname. When it's a headline that Oprah is now on Twitter, you may as well say "That's your new nickname, Rollerblade Ass!". Countless articles beat us over the head with, "this is the new biggest deal ever and will alter our lives and grandkid's lives!!!" except, that never works either. When a late-night host asks quests, "So do you Twitter? or Tweet or Tweeter? Man do I sound lame.", you know its doomed.

When I think of the biggest technology deals now- iPods, Google, text messaging, etc. As ubiquitous and indispensable as they are now, they started off humbly. No one ever said "this will take over the world, Rollerblade Ass", they were just new products that may work, or may fail. iPods were embraced reluctantly after the failure of the much-hyped mini discs, remember those? Google was a neat internet tool, but they weren't the first search engine. Other search engines, like Yahoo and Web Crawler already seemed totally serviceable, no one predicted they'd grow into the behemouth that they are. Can anyone remember the first time they heard of text messaging? I can't. You never read about how Ashton Kutcher or Oprah is now texting. Talk show hosts didn't ask guests questions effectively asking, "So do you text, or are you not just a neanderthal, but a parciularly lame neanderthal?" like they do with Twitter.

Despite a lack of immediate annointing from the media, their organic growth was sure and steady and now they're staples of tens of millions of lives. Whereas, I think Twitter is akin to the boy who called, "Rollerblade Ass".