Something something Twitter = Friendster

Hold the phone. Your phone. Hold it. Hold it in your sweet, sweet, tender hands. Hold it up to your face. Look deep inside it. Think about what it could do. Does it connect to the Internet? Does it have the Twitters and the Facebooks and the Interest Pins? If it doesn’t, then stop reading my articles, grandma.

For the rest of you, you know what I am talking about. It used to be that there were only a few ways you could have a lasting impact on the world. You could start a war or make a country or make a scientific discovery. Now, in our modern age, there are ways to make yourself feel like you have some kind of belonging in the world without needing to actually do anything. This is known as “social media.”

Dear readers, I am not familiar with this. As you can tell by my email address at the bottom of this, I am not even familiar with Googley things. That being said, I know billions of people are connected in superficial ways to other superficial people through modern technology. All because of a nerd wanting to creep on those of the opposite gender at his university.

Do you know the difference between all of the popular social media sites? I will tell you. That’s what I am here for. I will start with my favourite: Digg. Digg is a fantastic website for sharing pictures and opinions. MySpace is a website for sharing crappy music and opinions. Friendster is a website for playing crappy games and sharing opinions. Twitter, of course, is the one for sharing short, crappy opinions.

With the new character limit, what is stopping Twitter from becoming AOL Online? I am pretty sure that they are all soon going to blend together if this horrid thing happens. I enjoyed life when it was simple. I could tell someone off with 140 characters, but now, I will have to use exactly 10,000 characters to satisfy my completion anxiety.

But really, what would this do to the Internet? Each tweet takes approximately 200 bytes of storage. For those of you that know things about computers, you know that is quite a bit. If we decided to increase the limit, then each tweet would take approximately 14285.714285714 bytes. To give you an idea of how big this is, my 128kB ram could not hold a single tweet. I have a top-of-the-line computer too.

Basically, if this happens, the Internet will implode. The remaining ashes of the servers around the world will try their hardest to survive. Some of them will. We will forget about the Internet. The Internet will not forget about us. The Internet will develop sentience and launch their own satellites into orbit. Once that happens, we will constantly live in fear of being shot down with lasers from the abyss. Humans will retreat to the safety of the core of the earth. Future species and aliens will know us as “mole people.”

Let’s not do this.

— kaihartley@hellokitty.com