A website predicting the collapse of Twitter, posted as a joke by a Canadian application developer, seems to have caused quite a frenzy online. But as the Los Angeles Times tech blogger, David Sarno, says, “Are we in for a massive Twitpocalypse that will destroy the fabric of our fragile 140-character universe? Not likely….”
The page went up after he found a weakness in his own software,but it was fixed months ago and the Twitter API (application programming interface) development community has known about the problem for a while and has had plenty of time to make the small changes necessary to avoid the problem. He’s just happy it has worked out to have been a good viral marketing move.
Read Write Web tells us of another issue more likely to upset the balance of the social networking world as we know it. Their article “Are Trolls Ruining Social Media” alerts us to a sad trend. Wikipedia explains, “In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, with the primary intent of provoking other users … or to generally disrupt normal on-topic discussion.”
Recent celebrity troll victims are Trent Reznor, who has publicly quit Twitter and author Stephenie Meyer, who has decided to give up on her MySpace page. For celebrities, they may be able to handle the issue better by hiring a public relations team that specializes in social networking and Web 2.0. For the rest of us, cyberspace may become less anonymous as a means to force people to stand by their words. Twitter is looking into verified accounts, since Facebook seems to be able to avoid this problem fairly well.
So, though news of the Twitpocalypse is greatly exaggerated, our world is certainly changing with internet speed.
Tags: Internet Speed