What a bumpy road Twitter has had these last few months.

You’ve had your fair share of downtime
You’ve had to turn off feature after feature
You’ve fired your chief architect
You raised cash fast and hired an outside firm to fix the architecture.
You’ve been pummeled by your users.
You’ve been pummeled by the blogosphere.
You’ve been utterly incinerated by the blogosphere.
Your downtime woes even have a Wikipedia article.

During this time, my Twitter use has dropped dramatically. Yes, I still have TwitterFox installed (I can’t install Twhirl due to some damn problem with my laptop), and yes, I do occasionally tweet. But I’m not actively trying to add more followers and I’m not actively checking my tweets. I’ve moved on. In fact, I’ve moved on from Microblogging.

But it seems that many Twitter early adopters have not. Every week a new service appears that is herald as the “Twitter Killer.” Plurk one week, Utterz the next, and now Identi.ca this week.

I have a harsh reality for you, though - The peak of the Microblogging era has passed. The Conversation era has come.

Seriously, what use does the average person have for Twitter? I had a harshly negative reaction from a friend of mine to the service - why does she want to be telling people online what she’s doing at any given moment? What purpose is there to it? Why should anyone care what she’s doing and why should she WANT anyone to care? She doesn’t want to text status updates from the airport - she just wants to keep in touch with friends.

To the average person, Twitter is a useless distraction. But with the Conversation era, you get something more.

FriendFeed is central the Conversation era. And it’s actually useful to the average person. Not only are you kept abreast of what your friends are doing, but you’re actually having conversations about it (Twitter @replies don’t count - it was always about what you sent out to the world rather than the fragmented conversation you never could see anyway). You can ask questions and get answers, you can create quasi-message boards, and you can import your microblogging services into FriendFeed. The Microblogging era is literally being fed into the new Conversation era.

Don’t expect Twitter to recapture the magic of torrents of tweets, of trying to get more followers, of waiting for @replies. It’s nearly over and it was never meant to last.

So Ends the Microblogging Era.

- Ben

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