Twitter is the new MySpace

I get a lot of good emails but Rachel made a great observation today:

Not only is “Spongebob” a trending topic on Twitter, but it’s “Wich Spongebob.” The fact that we have gazillions of people taking quizzes about their similarity to a Spongebob character is sad, but not nearly as sad as the fact that the word ‘which’ is being so persistently misspelled.

Twitter has become MySpace.

We knew it was coming when celebrities showed up. We knew the site was a big deal even before the illegally stolen, internal, not-for-public-consumption documents were released.

The obvious difference being the “openness” of Twitter. MySpace, Facebook, etc. required at least some level of friendship to get to people’s intimate details. Not to mention this level of aggregation, which is only skimming the surface, has never been so public before The original beauty of Twitter was the quick-yet-personal musings that everyone could see (private profiles are often condemed by “social media experts”) and chose to follow.

But now the rest of the world is here and it’s a bit frightening. Its not the small ecosystem that we initially enjoyed being a part of. Senators, porn stars, real estate agents, company executives: they’re all here. Plus, everything is indexed, searchable, retweetable, and easy to find.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw more people revert back to a more “closed” system in the near future. We are teetering on the edge of novel and unnerving.