We are not tremendous fans of Twitter — mainly because we find 140-character Tweets the lowest form of contentless publication that pretends to have prescience — but now we must bite our tongues and bind our fingers as we realize the Golden Age of the Web is over as Twitter heralds the advent of the New Dark Ages.
Here’s why we are predicting the end of the Golden Age:
Is there gold in them thar tweets?
Maybe so, because-according to sources familiar with the situation-Twitter is in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately about striking data-mining deals, in which the companies would license a full feed from the microblogging service that could then be integrated into the results of their competing search engines.
Sources said a number of scenarios are being discussed to compensate Twitter for its huge and potentially valuable trove of real-time and content-sharing information, generated from the data stream of billions of tweets from its 54 million monthly users.
Let me get this straight: Bing and Google want to pay Twitter so they can index all those meaningless Tweets and include them in our search returns?
How is that memeingful content worthy of a second life?
When are we all going to stand up and shout out to the world that we know the king has no clothes: We know Twitter hath no feathers!
Why do we still pretend Tweets have a context that deserves preservation and indexing?
We do it because Tweeting is easier than real writing. I know many bloggers who have given up their blogs to Tweet all day long. We have lost community mindshare and moral relevance in that disconcerting disconnect between thought and impulse. We now run on raw instinct instead of practiced intellect.
When we turn away from the difficult sun to find comfort in a cold dimming — the Dark Ages descend and suspend us — and we become merely a series of unchained, static, moments instead of an unlimited, expanding, and connected, deep, human, cogency.