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”.