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.