Count on the Web to Smear and Absorb Anything We Love

Of course you were there in 1924 when Gene Austin (the singer who made “My Blue Heaven” into the best-selling recording of all time, at that time), together with songwriter Jimmy McHugh and music publisher Irving Mills, hit the top in a show called “Grab Bag” with a song we still hear today:

When my sugar walks down the street/All the little birdies go “Tweet, tweet, tweet.”

“Tweet” survived right up until last year. Tweetie Pie, the nasty little “I taut I taw a puddy-tat” cartoon bird, didn't damage it a whit. But count on the Web to smear and absorb anything we love. “Tweet” now has been usurped and reprogrammed as the principal component of Twitter.

If you say, “What the bleep is he referring to?” I wish I could say, “I'm with you all the way.” But I can't, because like the man in the iron mask, I'm a prisoner of the World Wide Web. We prisoners walk in lock step or are left in the sand to die.

The Great Bard said, “When sorrows come, they come not as single spies, but in battalions.” How prescient he was! Suddenly we had MySpace, where everybody could be a closed-circuit celebrity. Every teenager except, I'm guessing, those hiding with Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan/Pakistan wilderness, had to initiate a presence on MySpace. As is common to plagues, the infection spread through the general population, even to us sophisticates. It isn't common knowledge that Rupert Murdoch owns MySpace but doesn't post his own comings and goings.

In keeping with the Web's pattern of reproducing itself, MySpace had company — Facebook, LinkedIn and who knows what else. (How many invitations have you had this week to be listed as a friend of somebody you don't know?) And YouTube became a major player when nobody was looking.

Last year, Facebook had revenue of $300 million and lost just $50 million. Now, that's a sign of online success. A couple of years ago Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube, which charges advertisers about $200,000 for a branded channel with a customized background. That's a more valid sign of online success.

Remember “Ask Jeeves,” reduced and absorbed to become Ask.com? Google blew it away, along with Excite.com and Dogpile and AltaVista and Netscape and who knows how many others. Many of them still exist, as does Yahoo, teetering on the edge and adding just enough competition to supply confusion.

Let's not forget that we now live in the blogosphere. Millions and millions of blogs let millions and millions of would-be celebrities have their 15 minutes of fame with 15 viewers.

Blogs do have value. Andrew Flagel, dean of admissions at George Mason University, has a successful student recruitment blog. But even he says, “The world of blogs, especially on admissions, is terribly overcrowded.” And he adds, “Worse, on many of the discussion boards the lack of honesty and marketing attempts through these blogs are openly mocked.”

But, you ask, what does all that have to do with “Tweet”? Suddenly, here's a new contender named Twitter. CNN has made Twitter its principal feedback mechanism for both its viewers. The one benefit of Twitter is that it limits its messages — and there they are, the little bastids, called Tweets — to 140 characters, so verbosity isn't yet a major factor in this latest faux-spice dumped into the murky Web soup.

In answer to your unasked question, yes, I resent those smirking schoolkids who can use their thumbs to whip out text messages. Twitter has them all a-tweet, because it gives them another grammatically inept avenue to exchange platitudes and test questions.

Time to get even! Let's start a new service. We'll call it “Putter.” It transmits only symbols that require the use of two fingers on a BlackBerry, and messages from Putter are called Putz. We'll show it on CNN and David Letterman and Fox News and “Desperate Housewives.”

It has to be a hit. Who can resist the message, “Show us your Putz”?

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HERSCHELL GORDON LEWIS (www.herschellgordonlewis.com) is the author of 31 books, including the recently published “Creative Rules for the 21st Century.” He's also written “Hot Appeals or Burnt Offerings,” the curmudgeonly titled “Asinine Advertising,” and “Effective E-mail Marketing.”