Blogs predict the future of social networking

A story in the New York Times about the decline in blogging suggests the future of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools. It turns out that only about 5% of all identifiable blogs have been updated in the past 120 days. Put another way, 95% of blogs have been abandoned for all intents and purposes. I have always maintained that blogging is about writing, not about publicity or fame. If you like to write, blogging is easier (though not necessarily easy). If you don't have writing in your blood, blogging is just plain hard work.

Fast backward seven years to 2002 as the blogging craze was taking off, and if you believed all the techno-pundit hype, we were all going to be bloggers. I never believed it, and we are now going through the same overwrought hype with things like Facebook and Twitter. Five years from, both tools will still be around, but most people will have moved on and will use Facebook and Twitter for a few well-defined and generally narrow purposes, and that's it.

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Perhaps the real trend is that Twitter and Facebook are pulling the "pretenders" who were only blogging to fulfill a need for expressing themselves publicly away from that medium. If anything, this will make the community of bloggers who take the time to post regularly with real, interesting content even stronger. Facebook and Twitter are quick fixes for expression and as long as they are funded, will continue to be around in some form leaving the "blogosphere" even stronger.