lenier.net

Apparently as Ruby Rose goes, so goes the nation.

It was the year when Twitter came and went – a fad formed in February and dropped in December, proof that this is the land of the short attention span.

Uhh. What? Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.

Australia has long been legendary as a nation of early adopters, the ideal test market for gadgets and products. We embraced colour TV, the VCR, the mobile phone, the games machine and the DVD faster than any other outpost of Western culture.

I’ll pay that. We’re pretty on top of it. When we’re allowed such progression by the media-conglomerates-that-be, of course.

Now it’s apparent that another of our traits could be useful to the international marketing industry – we are early discarders. On television, we lost interest in Lost, Ugly Betty, Heroes, PrisonBreak, 24 and FlashForward long before the Americans.

Speak for yourself. But this makes no sense. What does Heroes’ post season one writing have to do with Social Media service popularity? Or for that matter, the fact that bogans love Border Security, Dancing with the Stars and Packed to the Rafters. Anyway…

In communications, Australia’s most trendsetting spokesmodel, Ruby Rose, announced this month that she has cancelled her Twitter service. Telling the world everything you’re doing every minute is just not amusing any more. Rose has reached an epiphany: that when you have nothing interesting to say, there is no need to say anything. If Australia’s answer to Paris Hilton decides she couldn’t give a Twit, the rest of the partygoing community cannot be far behind.

She’s Australia’s answer to who now? If she actually did have this unfortunate distinction, it would only be teenagers and morons that would be affected by her choice of self-promotion tool. Oh right… I’m starting to see where you’re headed, David.

Back in February, when the media started trumpeting Twitter as the hottest self-promotion tool since the megaphone, I asked a social researcher what he made of it. “It’s a classic case of BOFSDT,” he replied. That acronym stands for Boring Old Farts Suddenly Discover Technology.

A Social Researcher? He was not willing to divulge his identity? Or age? Takes one to know one, right? If I’m not wrong BOFSDT is the very definition of today’s ‘Social Media Expert’.

“The teenagers aren’t using it,” he said. “They’re happy with Facebook. People over 30 do most of the Twittering – especially politicians and journalists who think it makes them hip and groovy. Their children think it’s a wank.”

Saying Twitter is unpopular because teens don’t use it is like saying Orkut is unpopular because while huge in Brazil and India, it’s been abandoned in the US. The fact is that it’s still got 100+ million users.

The Twitter frenzy peaked during the Liberal leadership chaos, when multitudes of grey-haired males were seen frantically thumbing their mobiles in party rooms and parliamentary chambers. It was downhill from there. A month later Rose delivered the death blow.

It did? She did? I followed Ruby Rose and I didn’t even know about her deleting her account until today.

Anyway, let’s get this straight. Ruby Rose quits Twitter and therefore, in Australia, Twitter is dead and buried. But since teens never used it anyway, it’s probably only the people who used it for ‘hip and groovy’ PR that will feel the loss. Everyone else who was using it either pre-2009 or as, you know, a social network instead of a public relations experiment won’t notice a thing.

Listen, I have no doubt that Twitter gets rolled by something else in a couple of years. It’s just what happens. It’ll happen to Facebook too. The point is, as a 30-something geek, I don’t want or need the damn thing to be mainstream. I just need it to be useful. Fun. A distraction.

Get off my lawn.