The origins of the Miss Internet Hoopla pageant are shrouded in mystery Nobody's quite sure if this is the second annual event, or the seventh, or where exactly it's supposed to be held. It's entirely possible I made the whole thing up myself.
You'd have thought that by the end of 2008, an institution like this would have been written off as archaic. But it seems that now, more than ever, everybody loves some Internet Hoopla, the wave of rapt fascination with an online concept that's just broken into the mainstream.
In 2004, the rise of blogs and their newfound political power gripped the public attention. In 2005, Wikipedia and the virtues of crowdsourcing announced themselves to the general public. In 2006, YouTube mushroomed into an online-video juggernaut, and ushered in a new age of user-generated cat videos. In 2007, Facebook went from college diversion to mainstream phenomenon.
And now, it's the end of 2008, and here she comes, the latest Miss Internet Hoopla. Today, everybody is facing the imperative of signing up to Twitter, the service that has just sashayed away with the crown.
Twitter is a micro-blog – a blogging service where every entry is teeny-tiny. It's rather like posting Facebook status updates, but mercifully liberated from the concept of “friendship.” On Twitter, you don't have to be somebody's friend to read their thoughts; you just have to be interested in what they have to say. I have a theory about this: Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better.
Like most winners in the pageant's brief and querulous history, Twitter had already been around for a while by the time it got big. It was somewhere around the middle of 2008, however, that it hit that critical mass of users able to bring it into the mainstream. (In mathematical terms, I call it the “whoop-de-do number”: the point at which any given website has amassed enough users to become a great, freaking whoop-de-do.) So, when pageant time came around, it aced every event.
Event one: The math quiz. Let's see what kinds of ridiculous numbers the contestants can come up with. Have masses of people signed up to the service since lunch? This week, a report by HubSpot, an online market-research firm, estimates that Twitter is adding between 5,000 and 10,000 users every single day. Hardly a bad showing.
Event two: The swimsuit competition. In the glamour event, preening competitors need to convince the general public they must join the hoopla or risk getting left behind. Marketing experts and social-media mavens will announce that this new idea is the way to go. Don Tapscott will write a book. If you don't join in, somebody from the Internet will come by and stamp the word FAIL on your forehead.
Event three: The talent show. This is a perennial favourite, the part where entrants enumerate all the novel things they can do, while the judges feign amazement that the things people have always done on the Internet can be done with this new tool, too. This year, one writer tried serializing a novel on Twitter in 140-character chunks. (“Oooh,” said the gallery.) Santa Claus Twittered his progress across the world this week. (“Aaah,” said onlookers.) There were Twitter proposals, and Twitter breakups, Twittering politicians, Twitter parties and Twitter protests. Take that, every other form of communication!
Event four: The money-making. This is a trick competition. Nobody should come to Miss Internet Hoopla wanting to make money; that would be crass. Unlike the pageant's runner-up – the iPhone App Store, which threw down its flowers and stalked offstage, muttering something about not doing any more trade shows – Twitter appears to have no idea how to make money. It's free, doesn't run advertising, and still hasn't explained how it intends to turn a profit. The key thing is that it has plenty of good vibrations, which for the past few years have been legal tender in Silicon Valley.
And that, sadly, casts a bit of a pall over this year's proceedings. By every account, the party's over for free-spending Internet startups, the kind that could let neat ideas take flight without knowing how they'd pay for themselves. We are venturing into a strange new era in which people will pay for things, possibly with money they actually have. And that, I have to tell you, is not the spirit of Internet Hoopla.
A year ago, I asked the question: After Facebook, what? It seemed inevitable that, as the novelty wore off and Facebook became part of the landscape, some new, free, hypersocial phenomenon would sweep in and capture the public imagination. And sure enough, there was Twitter. But is it inevitable that the pace of innovation will keep up, and that the digerati will be atwitter about a new approach to online communications by the end of 2009? After all, an awful lot of ideas need to be thrown at the wall before one sticks.
The answer, of course, is that innovation never stops; it just loses the devil-may-care abandon that marks the good times. The Miss Internet Hoopla crown will be passed on in 2009, even if we have to rename it the Certificate of Satisfactory Entrepreneurship. It won't be the same without the heels and the confetti and the can-can line of singing bloggers. But, you know, we roll with the times.
