Please tell me this was not inspired by me (finally) joining Twitter today.

nope, inspired by the TwitterFlame I got

I think that while “devolve” may unfortunately be accurate, Twitter is likely to devolve into something other than a normal online community as we’d currently define it: the follow-based structure means that Twitter lacks a central “there” to be flamed, spammed, and crapflooded into irrelevance in the traditional manner, so some fresh hell must be looming.

Most likely scenario seems like everybody completely ignoring @replies from those they don’t follow, turning off those “X is now following you” emails, and following only a small number of people. Now that I think about it, seems like I’m describing Twitter devolving back into its original formulation of sharing what you’re doing with a small, pre-existing social group. Huh.

Hi Ethan,

interesting observations. Twitter is actually just going through the normal motions of a hijacked brand I would say. The Brand (twitter) was first accepted by early adopters, (which by the way put their own meaning into it). From there on it gets accepted by a much bigger user base. It might devolve in geek cooldom, but it will clearly evolve in user numbers (weather that’s bad or not is up to everyone to make their own opinion).

@whiteneymcn: Why does twitter lack a “central there”? Did it ever need one? It never claimed to have one. I really hate when “online communities” evolve from their original idea (what made them so cool) to the myspace death. Had myspace stuck to their original purpose or idea, it might actually still be worth using. Same thing could happen to twitter.

I hope twitter never get’s a “central there”, because that’s pretty much the reason why I use it.

Cheers, Hans