Twitter is so over - time to move on, or off?

We were talking yesterday at Amplified 09 about when and how the Cool School decide to move on from any one thing, and how its typically when something goes mainstream. And then the conversation moved on to Twitter, its incipient mainstreaminess, and thus where the Cool Kids will go (because go they will - last year this time it was All About Facebook, if you recall....). Yesterday morning, in the Digital Britain report, the chairman peered at his computer and pronounced that there was "A question coming through on the Twitter", much as operators of Telegraphs in tense moments in Cowboy movies did. Funnily enough, today I see someone else had the same idea - Kerry Gafney:

The 5 signs something has gone mainstream

People start to ask if it is the new version of the last thing went mainstream

The spammers move in

People try to find an advertising model

Celebrities are all over it

The Daily Mail claims that it causes cancer/brain damage/end of society as we know it (and politicians adopt it...)

All we need now for someone to claim that Twitter is dead and we can all move on to the next big thing.

So, in the interests of completing these conditions, let us now see if there is substance behind that last claim that "Twitter is Dead".

Clearly, when we say "Twitter is Dead" we don't mean that the service is actually defunct, more that it is no longer cool, and that the "In Crowd / Early Adopters / Opinion Formers / Name Your Term" will be looking for The New New Thing (TNNT) to differentiate themselves from the lumpen majority. So, are there any signs emerging, any Green Shoots of the TNNT?

Well, a few months ago FriendFeed was going to be TNNT, and there is still a cadre that believes it will all go Web 3D as we live our Second Lives, and Plurk emerged as an alternate lifestream service - but right now all their stars seems to be waning - and once waned, it is very seldom that anyone waxes lyrical again. But clearly lifestreaming is Going To Be Big - after all, Stowe Boyd said so

So, what could replace Twitter, given there is no obvious New New Thing?

Well, Lifestreaming will be multimedia, multimodal, multimessageing - so I've been quite interested in the development of what I'd call Twitter Aggregation Boards (TABs), like Tweetdeck and so on. These effectively become the "Netscapes" of the RealTime Lifestream Web. Once you use those in any coherent way, you no longer actually use Twitter itself - it drops back to its core function, which is a Unified Comms service - the middleware on top of the Web on top of the 'Net that makes the End User Requirements really work.

And of course once you have these sort of TAB systems, you can use them to aggregate the stuff coming in from any other messaging services - and not just Identi.ca and Friendfeed and so on, but all those Feeds you Reads - even (gasp) email. So you move from Unified Comms to Unified Conversation Systems.

And at that point you will want to put in powerful search, and ratings, and "Electronc Person Guides" etc etc - and people will set up TwitMeme and LastTwit.fm and Twitnorati and so on.

And at that time, the user base has moved off Twitter onto the next layer up and like the cities of old, the Twitter Layer is buried under the New layer, until it too is covered by the digital detritus of the layer above it, and so on, and so forth.

Update - in a parallel post, John Battelle likens Twitter to YouTube:

So, fast forward to today. What's the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who's the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It's an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own.

Leave aside that YouTube is not a search engine but an aggregator and (lousy) program guide (Google does the search function), he is describing the same phenomenon - its that Twitter becoming the transport mechanism for "text radio" (to introduce another media into the mix, but I think its more apt) channels - where he is wrong though, is that we will consume it on TAB Sets, not on the the direct firehose.

Update 2 - a later post by Ross Mayfield, explaining the issues with popularity bringing defective behaviour:

you may have noticed a rise in @reply spam. Real and fakester accounts are being set up and using @replies to get messages into the view of users who aren't following them. Some marketeers have seemingly mastered the meeting, like the ShamWowDude (not to be confused with the ShamWowGuy).

Twitter already fights the good fight against phished Avatars, but the war is escalating and changes are inevitable. They have the advantage of being able to kick bad users according to their policy. And disadvantages given what Twitter is (its hard for me to imagine traditional spam filters applied to neartime communications at this scale).