Epitaph: To a failed Social Media Platform

Lots of wailing this weekend that Leo Laporte's Buzz stopped buzzing and no-one noticed, and Paul Carr (he who hath renounced all Social Media save Twitter) going off about the fact that the less effort you put into what you write, the less impact it will have (also known as Hen3y's Law):

And then along came micro-blogging – and, with a finite amount of time and effort available, the blog generation turned into the Twitter (or Facebook) generation. A million blogs withered and died as their authors stopped taking the time to process their thoughts and switched instead to simply copying and pasting them into the world, 140 meaningless characters at a time. The result: a whole lot of sound and mundanity, signifying nothing.

Louis Gray, as is his wont, reminds us of Friendfeed and other Ghost Town socnets through which digital tumbleweeds roll.

To these wothies I would like to point out that one of the Gurus of Web 0.0 had it taped a long time ago - over to you, T S Eliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

By the way, Laporte, Carr and Gray now all say that of course these Microservices were just hollow voices, quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass - and that Blogs have always been The Right Way forward, and that this was always going to be The Endgame. Nothing like rushing to the front of a crowd already headed in a direction and yelling "follow me" eh chaps*

But, watch what they do, not what they say - when they all bail off Twitter I'll believe the New Mantra. In reality, the truth is these services all support different roles in the coommunications ecosystem, along with email, video, telephones (fixed and mobile) etc etc. There will be a need for a short message service, an IM service, an aggregation service, etc etc. What is unclear is which will win, its far too early in the development of these things. What is also clear is that (most) people like things to interwork without too much hassle, intrusion and clutter.

Which, of course, is why Buzz and Friendfeed ended. With whimpers............

*PS - Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but I do recall Carr and Gray being promoters of the shiny new microblogging thing a few years back. Anyone?