Twitter, I know we’ve been going out for a while. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve had some great times, some great conversations. You’re smart and succinct, you get your point across with a minimum of fuss. Your not like the other girls, myspace….airhead, and facebook. Facebook used to be so skinny but then she got fat, and forced me to keep inviting all her friends over.

What’s that? You say our relationship has never been stronger. That may be so now but what about in 6 months or 12 months? I think it’s better if we break it off and see other people. I hear brightkite is single.

OK, perhaps a bit negative and preemptive, but my cynicism says that everything good must die. Or is that everything niche must become mainstream? Hitwise chronicle the metaphoric rise of twitter on the Internet, and while they (and everyone involved) maintain that twitter is niche, with those traffic jumps one day soon it won’t be. What then?

At present twitter is a coming together of the best and brightest (generally speaking). Early adopters tend to be cutting edge, the deep end of the gene pool if you will. Once it becomes a mainstream hit, as everything good on the internet tends to, the gene pool will become diluted.
Or to put in far scarier but more palpable terms, the most followed will no longer be Barack Obama or Leo Laporte or Kevin Rose, but instead Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan or Madonna. Shudder. Obviously you have the choice who to follow, but to me once something becomes popular it loses something, a certain Je ne sais quoi.

So while that has yet to happen (and I will pray to my Atheist Gods it never does), I will savor twitter as something that has yet to be dumbed down. I’ll remember it for what it was.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Semantic wordpress tagging
• » (Tech) evangelism in the 21st century

• BROWSE / IN musings
• « Ebay and PayPal become even better friends, now BFF
• » (Tech) evangelism in the 21st century