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”.

I’ve already lived through the 80s once; and with all the neon colors designers are integrating into clothes this year, I’m having flashbacks every time I walk through a mall. It pains me, literally, to see a new generation making the same fashion mistakes we made in the 80s. Along with Flock of Seagull haircuts, neon colors should have been left in the last century. I have pictures of myself from the 80s and I cringe everytime I even think about my skate-or-die haircut with my bangs hanging down in front of my eyes and a gawdy neon print t-shirt bright enough to flag down an airplane if I ever got lost in the wilderness.  Now these poor kids are going through it again. They’re gonna regret their fashion choices in a few years when they look back  and say, “What the hell was I thinking?”  Now with the popularization of facebook, their pictures won’t just disappear into a box under their bed, they’ll be forever imortalized on the every present world wide web. Now it looks like their gonna make the mistakes of the 90s as well.

I caught this candid picture of a college girl at Office Depot in the San Gabriel Valley. (Please, no comments on me taking candid pics of young girls in public places) Anyway, notice the telltale red and black lumberjack plaid. Grunge was an anti-fashion movement that originated in the 90s Seattle music scene, that was popularized by bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and characterized by its combination of plaid button downs with shorts or ripped jeans. Now it looks like this anti-fashion is becoming the latest trend for the uber-fashionable. According to this article from late last year ’90s Grunge Is Making a Comeback.

Despite attempts to be new and original, I think fashion is circular because when it gets too avant garde it becomes completely unrecognizable and then it’s just mistaken as having no taste at all. The way I see it, the trendsetters try to set themselves apart from the rest of the masses by wearing items that are on the edge of good taste. Then everybody else picks up on this, and wanting to be trendy but not too different, adopts items and trends that are recognizable with them, like trends from the past.  And every time a fashion era is recycled, it gets a slight update in some way, like with a more current cut or getting paired with more current accesories like the black tights and oversized purse of the chick in the picture above. In my completely unfashionable opinion, sometimes it works and sometimes you end up with the eye scorching color palette of the eighties. Next thing you know, we’ll be wearing Birkenstocks and Doc Martens again.

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.

Ipod Kills Pedestrian

Ok, this made a big stir a short while back so I won’t spend a lot of time ranting on it, but I just heard a story on NPR talking about a new ad campaign in San Francisco that warns about the dangers of crossing the street while distracted. …Duh! Well actually, I believe PSAs are a much better way of getting this message across than passing a law forbidding the use of handheld devices in crosswalks like that politician in New York tried to do. I understand that avoidable street collisions can strain our already over taxed medical system but I feel that there is a bigger issue at hand. Are we creating laws that just serve the stupid while over regulating the rest of the population? Are we in fact diluting our gene pool to a point where people who don’t deserve to breed are saved long enough to put ill equipped progeny on this earth? I understand that it is a constant battle to keep the public safe from new dangers that evolving technology present but sometimes we have to defer to COMMON SENSE. But where to draw the line? Are we just creating a society of idiots that natural selection would have eliminated generations ago? If I’m not smart enough to look both ways before I cross the street and need laws to protect me from myself, do I have the common sense needed to raise children? I argue no. We’re talking preservation of our species here people.

American Apparel in Little Tokyo

I’m in Little Tokyo right now blogging by Blackberry and I’ve been forced to go into American Apparel. Don’t get me wrong, I love their T’s when talented designers use them for their shirts. Heck, I’ve even used their basic T’s for shirts that I’ve designed. But an American Apparel store? And not just one, there seems to be a new one popping up every other month in every other neighborhood. I could understand an America Apparel section in like a Macy’s but their stuff is so gaudy and tragic by itself. Its like a Madonna video from each decade threw up in there, and they called it a store. Leg warmers, rainbow colors, who wears this stuff? Just cause you have a bunch of merchandise doesn’t warrant opening a chain of stores and striking a blow to the fashion conscious everywhere. This is one trend that I hope passes soon.

Confused inside American Apparel in Little Tokyo