Now that Twitter has been hacked again, and we’ve been cast back into the Dark Pre-Twitter Ages, one has the sense that we have reached the End of Innocence stage in our love affair with the social. We have to take a step back and think, how am I going to drive traffic to my site without the mighty Twitter to broadcast my bits of wit to the world? Let’s face it, running your mouth on Twitter is a helluva lot more fun than agonizing over the SEO for some product you want to inject into the Collective Unconscious.
Twitter is where it’s at, at least this is what the Know-It-Alls are proclaiming—the Kawasaki’s, the Scobleizers, the Ferriss’s and Godin’s. Don’t they all bray that you must use Twitter or you will die a miserable cringing death in a ditch as the journalist/pundits/prize-winning-hackers stand over your pathetic corpse and pronounce you an incorrigible moron? Pardon my indignation, but this is the message the authorities are sending: use Twitter or fail, dude.
Oh, they may be right, those pundits—when Twitter is actually up and working. But what if Twitter is being bombed into the Stone Age by some techno brutes who want to ruin our fun and profit. Then, the man/woman whose life hangs by a fragile Twitter thread will find themselves in the tank. Of course, there will be at least one contrarian anti-pundit shouting that those who Live by the Twitter, Die by the Twitter.
As Twitter hardens up—as it will no doubt do—will it still remain fun and open and a breath of fresh air? If we can judge by the other big social sites—Friendster and Myspace and Facebook—we’re in for some big changes. Those bad boys all evolved from innocent honeypots to crass social mining advertising operations. Twitter will go that way of all flesh once the investors start asking for some of their money back and “relevant” ads start to appear next to our brilliant bon mots. Once Twitter tries to mine that rushing stream of real time data flowing through it, they will choke off what makes Twitter cool: its wind-in-the-hair, driving-daddy’s-convertible, summer-vacation freedom from having to earn a living. Once the kid has to get a job and and pay the piper, look out.
Whoa! Hey, I gotta go now. Twitter is back up. I’ve got to push this blog post into the Stream. Later.
Happy hacking…
