Life After Twitter And Facebook

You know those apocalyptic strategy games, where a huge catastrophe strikes Earth? And everything is dark and sad, you don’t have any resources left and you gotta make it by yourself? Well, let’s imagine that for a second. But instead of all the Earth being hit, let’s pretend that only two major things are hit: Twitter and Facebook. Lets try to imagine our life after the sad end of Twitter and Facebook.

  1. Instead of being happy when somebody is following you all of a sudden, you just start asking yourself “why”. Especially when the following is taking place on a dark alley.
  2. When you really like something, you just smile. You don’t look desperately for the “like” button.
  3. When you meet someone new you don’t get automatically in your mailbox a letter promoting his latest hugely discounted ebook.
  4. You finally start noticing that trees are actually growing around you, not inside computers, when you press that tiny button called “Farmville”.
  5. If a guy promises to retweet you if you do the same for him, you suddenly decide to cross to the other side of the street. From where you can safely shout at him: “You dirty pervert!”.
  6. When they’ll want to stalk each other, people will revert to the old fashion way of using private investigators.
  7. Some of the unadapted will start talking out of the blue in short, witty and somehow cryptic sentences, not longer than 140 chars. They will be called “Tourettes” and usually avoided at parties. When they’re not the party attraction, of course.
  8. Historians will be puzzled by the unexplainable extinction of an entire species, called “social media expert”. Much like the dinosaurs. No living proof of that species will ever be found again.
  9. If friends will want to send you photos from the last barbecue, they’ll send you photos from the last barbecue. They won’t tag you, that is.
  10. Poking someone you barely know will usually trigger a lawsuit.

Many years after the complete extinction of Twitter and Facebook, a brilliant (yet strangely unadapted) student, dumped by his girlfriend, will want to show to the whole world that he’s not as bad as he looks. Of course, he writes a web app for that. The app eventually explodes into an incredibly popular site. Student becomes billionaire. Hundreds of millions are using the site. In an old, dusty chronicle, a historian finds out that it was a prophecy about that web site. Many years before, an entire civilization, in a desperate act of survival, left a cryptic message. Within weeks of hard work and thousands of super computers involved, the message is finally decrypted: “Social media is not dead, you idiots. And it’ll never be”.

Of course, a small faction of historians will give a completely different interpretation to the message, claiming that the first ones used the wrong decryption mechanism. For them, the message will look like: “A venti latte, please. With sugar on top and lots of cream. Presto!”.




23 thoughts on “Life After Twitter And Facebook”

  1. Hilarious! I love the one about getting promotional emails from a new “friend.” I’m unsubscribing from everyone who sends me promotional emails about their ebooks and trying to avoid sites with pop ups. The latter is hard since some of my favorite bloggers have them.

    Reply
    • To be honest, I wasn’t impressed by it. Maybe because I was working in this field myself many of the real life situations presented on the movie (renting houses and creating apps in them, creating and ending partnerships, and so on) were quite familiar. But I did like the end of it…

      Reply
  2. Hi there Dragos. I must say this was hilarious. For a split second I felt a bit of panic in my gut. What would I ever do without FB & Twitter? That made me think though about how much the world changes and how quickly we latch on to something new. All of a sudden, the overwhelming majority of my friends are people I’ve never actually met. People who have a tendency to poke me or write on my whenever they please. Luckily I love it!

    Reply
  3. Haha Dragos, really fun stuff!

    “When they’ll want to stalk each other, people will revert to the old fashion way of using private investigators.”

    Or binoculars and peep holes!

    My God, it’s hard to imagine this world without social media…

    Reply
    • Yeap, I had a hard time writing this post. At some point I even had to go to some social media site for inspiration, you know… 🙂

      Reply
  4. I think of social media as becoming similar to the prayer computer in Bruce Almighty- a constant churn of people asking you for attention over things that are actually quite mundane. I don’t think social media will go “extinct” as such- but it WILL develop into a form that will leave today’s sites barely recognisable. I predict headsets, video calls and video chatrooms, instant information and a bombardment of E-mithering. Like that scene in Minority report where Tom Cruise goes shopping.

    Reply
  5. Very witty post, it’s like the new TV, where people can’t imagine themselves surviving without TV!

    Now, if you take away social networking sites, people would just, like ‘oh my god’, die!! 😉

    Reply
  6. Facebook is a utility. Twitter has become a marketing tool. While facebook helps me connect with family and friends, twitter splashes me with thousands of links to blog posts and more. Twitter needs some more organization above lists.

    Reply
  7. Social Media is getting more and more powerful and people seems to be can’t live without it. When I’m doing a questionnaires about social media and gathering the information, my question to them: What if there’s no social media like facebook, twitter, blog?
    Their answers seems to be very sad and expressing the need towards social media in life.
    Life would be bored, can’t connect with many friends around, can’t live without it and so on.
    We human are like a parasit to social media, and it had becoming our daily activities.

    Reply
  8. Hi Dragos.

    It’s me Mike the social media expert here to take your site from A to A+ in 20 minutes with high-tech tools and services that will change the way you bring media to the people that you deal with. You’ll be going viral in no time with our 1-2-3 step software~

    Reply

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