Feat of Clay

The fact that many A list celebrities are now jumping on the band wagon and using Twitter for shameless self-promotion may just signal the start of the demise of Twitter. You can spot them a mile off - they are the ones who have hundreds of thousands of followers, but they are following ... yep, no-one. According to Everitt Rogers, all innovations and ideas tend to follow an adoption cycle that starts with the innovators, gradually reaching a critical mass through the early adoptors and then the early majority. It begins to run downhill when the late majority adopt it and it is no longer new and exciting, and everyone has it. Once it has sufficiently penetrated into society, telling signs are for example, that the technology begins to appear for sale in the Argos catalogue. Yesterday the BBC Technology News pages carried the headline 'Can Twitter survive the Hype-Cycle? In a tacit homage to Gartner's theory, it's an interesting piece which asks some serious questions about the future of the microblogging tool.

Well, Twitter won't be appearing in any store catalogues, but it might just be reaching its zenith in terms of use and popularity. Over at e-Learning Stuff, James Clay has pulled off no mean feat of insight by identifying 10 reasons why Twitter will eventually wither and die, and interestingly none of them are to do with the invasion of the likes of Oprah (an anagram of Harpo) and Ashton Kutcher (supply your own anagram) - although he does make reference to false celebrities. In amongst all the hyperbole about Twitter, it is refreshing to hear a counterpoint, even if it may read uncomfortably for some.

Although I enjoy using Twitter, and have tried out some nice little ideas about how to harness its potential in my own classrooms (see for example my earlier post entitled Teaching with Twitter), it may just, I fear, begin to go the way of some other social software tools. Yesterday I closed down my Bebo account, having failed to use it for more than 86 weeks. I currently use my Facebook account about once every 2 weeks and came perilously close yesterday to closing that down too, in a judicious spate of spring cleaning. As the late, great George Harrison once said: 'All things must pass'.

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