Whither Twitter?

Is it over for Twitter? With all of the gurus telling you the “right” way to use social networking to promote your acting career, I’m surprised none of them have recommended Friendster and Orkut. Be ready to abandon Twitter, and yes, even Facebook. Here’s why.

I’ve watched as workshops on how to “do social networking” have popped up, and I say, ignore them. The money you put toward them will be, eventually, for naught: the sites you’re going to learn, won’t be around in a few weeks, months or years. It’s a sad fact of Internet life, that we as an audience are fickle, and the next shiny butterfly that comes along (Foursquare, Virb, Gowalla, Wix, turning off the Internet entirely) to grab our attention away from the status quo, will render all that work we did to “do social networking” on a particular site a waste of time.

With one rare exception.

I’ve been on the Internet since 1973. Yes, well before Compuserve, I was working at NASA’s Lewis Research Center (it’s now called the Glenn Research Center), and was lucky enough to be around for the actual creation of email as we know it today. Before then, messaging was a haphazard amalgamation of homebrewed programs that allowed the government and the educational institutions that did research for it to communicate electronically. Then, everything got organized when a Bolt, Baranek and Newman engineer floated a proposal to make the @ sign the standard, the username before it and the domain after it as a unique address.

And it remains the same to this day, a rare standard that has not come and gone as another way of communication catches our attention.

Not so with social networks, or even the concept of social networking (email was the first, and remains the best, example of “social networking” – you young whippersnappers may disagree, but you’d be wrong). That which is extremely popular today may be derisively dismissed out of hand tomorrow as antiquated, mundane and so, so yesterday. Example: MySpace. Nuff said.

But don’t think that that won’t happen with Twitter (because it’s already happening – their messaging levels have dropped steadily since last December and you don’t really hear much about them in the news, signaling an eventual end-of-life) and, eventually, Facebook. If the privacy issues, the stalking issues, the not-getting-that-plum-job-because-your-potential-employer-saw-you-show-your-boobs-while-beer-bonging-it issues don’t kill Facebook, sheer familiarity will. It may not happen today, or next month, but it will happen. Be ready to abandon all of those carefully laid efforts to promote your acting via that particular site.

For some other site that will be wildly popular. And which you will also abandon.