There’s a new trend: Broad­cast my life! I am so interesting!

Now that every­one has the abil­ity to, every­one feels the need  …no, the oblig­a­tion to tell the world about every lit­tle thought they have and every bowel move­ment they make. No seri­ously, search for poo or bath­room on twit­ter, you’d be sur­prised. As I was telling my online neme­sis @violetmae (who by the way doesn’t know is my neme­sis yet), I don’t think there is enough inter­est­ing content/people to sup­port a site like Twit­ter for much longer. And now, with the main­stream­ing of Twit­ter, it will be over­loaded with com­plete drib­ble. Every­one from McCain, who doesn’t know how to email, to your mom (…lit­er­ally, your mom. I’m not try­ing to insult you) will be tweet­ing. It’s going to be a com­plete clusterf##k. Imag­ine if you got everybody’s Face­book sta­tus update in your news­feed. That’s going to be Twit­ter. It’d be the same as Youtube tak­ing over DirecTV …but worse! It’s 24/7 lol­cats, old man rants, and fat peo­ple dancing!

Then the next step in the Twit­ter move­ment would have to be a Hulu equiv­a­lent, a more focused site that only has qual­ity con­tent on it. But we already got that; that’s fmylife. But now fmylife has got­ten so pop­u­lar, it has con­se­quently gone to crap. Every­one with a key­board thinks they’re funny and they’ve started gam­ing fmylife with fake posts, fake posts that aren’t even good! I tried to show my friend fmylife the other day and told him how funny it was. We went through two pages before we found some­thing even mildly amus­ing. I was embar­rased. Worse thing was, the post was obvi­ously a fake. You’d need a whole cot­tage indus­try just to shift through the mess and aggre­gate what was worth­while. And the sad truth would be, most of it wouldn’t be worth my pre­cious time. Money, friends, online accounts …my time is the only thing I can’t make more of.

Here’s an even sad­der truth: If you’re bor­ing in real life, you’re prob­a­bly more so on Twit­ter. If you’re an idiot in real life and have idi­otic thoughts, Face­book sta­tus and Twit­ter just makes it eas­ier for the rest of the world to real­ize this …which I guess in it of itself isn’t a bad thing. Then I can weed the idiots out of my life a lot faster. It use to take a while to fig­ure out if a girl was a snotty clingy psy­cho. Now I can just look at her sta­tus his­tory and I’ll know in moments she’s psy­cho when she has post like, “What is love? Will I ever know it? Why are all the guys I date 8554o735?” or “I was out­side his apart­ment again last­night. He says she’s his sis­ter but I know he’s lying.”

But despite hav­ing it’s upshots, like the exam­ple men­tioned above, as well as hav­ing a few inno­v­a­tive and pro­duc­tive ways to use Twit­ter, most won’t know how to use it prop­erly and they will unfor­tu­nately over­whelm those who do. The mes­sages of busi­nesses like Dell and Kogi BBQ will only be a whis­per on the Twit­ter­scape drowned out by the noise of the illit­er­ate masses vying for our atten­tion. In fact, it would serve a busi­ness like Kogi bet­ter to have an API on their web­site that updated their cur­rent loca­tion than risk get­ting lost in #Kogi hell on Twit­ter with a bunch of crap reviews and unin­tended com­ments. Actu­ally, they should already be doing that right now. For proof, just search #sxsw and you’ll get more  “No, I’m not wear­ing green and no, you may not pinch me” than any sub­stan­tial news. And these are sup­pose to be the pros!

To me, the only ray of hope is Face­book. The new Face­book UI is meant to be more like Twit­ter, and that’s smart. Because a site ded­i­cated to tweet­ing alone isn’t inter­est­ing enough to keep my atten­tion. Look at Friend­ster, it was about degrees of seper­a­tion. If it just stayed as that, no one would go there any­more. It had to evolve and that’s what Face­book is doing with its new fron­tend.  And as soon as Face­book offers the best fea­tures of Twit­ter, there will be no real use to tweet. Not only does Face­book offers so much more fun­tion­al­ity than Twit­ter, Face­book has way too big a lead on users for Twit­ter to make a dent. I already intro­duced peo­ple to Twit­ter by telling them it was like a stream of Face­book sta­tuses, it just makes sense for Face­book to take over the Twit­ter world. Do I sense another buy out attempt? Prob­a­bly not, Twit­ter should have seen this com­ing when Face­book tried to buy them out the first time. Either way, it is Facebook’s will­ing­ness to evolve and it’s abil­ity to stay on the fore­front of trends that will keep Face­book at the top of our browser history. A rev­o­lu­tion is at hand, one that started with the Guten­berg Press and that is now cul­mi­nat­ing with sites like Twitter.  Mass pub­lish­ing has been brought to the masses and just like any war, there will be col­lat­eral dam­age. It might serve us all to find a safe place to take cover until the whole thing blows over …oh who am I kid­ding, look to the right of your screen at the blue box and click the icon that says “Follow”.

As a film­maker, I make a lot of fun short videos that I want to post to my blog and the omnipresent YouTube flash player has become too pedes­trian for me. It’s every­where, every­one has seen it, and I want my blog to look unique. Also, YouTube has recently imple­mented a new anti-piracy fea­ture that scans the audio in your video and com­pares it to a data­base of songs. Some­times, Youtube can mis­tak­enly tag your video as infring­ing on music even if it isn’t. Take for instance you film your friend and a car on the street has its radio too loud. Youtube can pick up on the song and poten­tially delete your video from its site. For those rea­sons and a few more, I decided to look for an alter­na­tive and found Vimeo wor­thy of giv­ing a try.

Like Youtube, Vimeo offers HD sup­port and pro­vides an ade­quate amount of stor­age space. But more impor­tantly in order to com­pete with YouTube’s dom­i­nance, Vimeo got all inno­v­a­tive with their fea­tures. Vimeo offers built in wid­gets that you can imple­ment in your blog or web­site. I’m really look­ing for­ward to play­ing with this one wid­get where it dis­plays all of my lat­est videos. I’m going to make a ded­i­cated videos page and use the wid­get as a visual gallery of my videos. In addi­tion, Vimeo gives me a per­sonal email that allows me to post videos by email. In con­junc­tion with the wid­get, I can update videos to my blog from the road. Vimeo also lets me spec­ify the size of the video so that I can embed the video with a size that fits the lay­out of my blog. Yes I can do this in Youtube with an easy alter­ation in html; but for peo­ple out there that don’t know html, this fea­ture is key. Lastly, Vimeo’s free account caps me at an ade­quate weekly limit of 500MB and 1 HD video per week.

The fol­low­ing is a test/example of Vimeo:

From the SNL comic duo Chris Par­nell and Andy Sam­berg that brought you Lazy Sun­day and Dick in a Box comes Jizz in My Pants.

This song par­ody …songody? …par­o­dong? This par­o­dong aired on Decem­ber 6, 2008 and although as funny if not more than the other two shorts, Jizz in My Pants still has not gained enough trac­tion to receive the title of “viral”. I would argue that this has to do with Hulu’s clamp­ing down on their videos being dis­trib­uted through YouTube. Lazy Sun­day and Dick in a Box did so much to bring buzz back to the long stale Sat­ur­day Night Live that if the execs over at NBC took their heads out of their asses for one minute, they’d real­ize that YouTube does more help than harm. I’m not even sure the above Hulu embed will still work by the time you guys are read­ing this. Hulu has been so incon­sis­tent with their video libraries it’s ridicu­lous, one week a clip is up the other week it’s gone. Now they’ve even pulled out from Boxee.

The whole viral phe­non­menon will not work if view­ers feel like they are being tricked by NBC into being pawns for NBC’s over­all mar­ket­ing strat­egy.  There is a cer­tain unspo­ken trust between sender and receiver; and as alruis­tic web denizens, we would rather not pass along unwanted adver­tiz­ing to friends who trust us to not lit­ter their inboxes with spam.