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Here is a wonderful paragraph that wouldn't have been written a few years ago:

I blog about twitter and tweet about blogging. Sometimes I blog about tweeting about blogging and tweet about blogging about twitter.

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"The universe is more prosperous and abundant than you can imagine." Well of course. It's the universe, and as such contains all the abundance that exists. I mean if you were to own the universe, you'd be pretty damned rich.

A Grey Goo Scenario

Two decades ago, a book came out that put nanotechnology in the public gaze and spawned quite a few science fiction novels: Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation. After telling us about the wonderful things we could do with nanotechnology, Drexler ends with a cautionary note: if we're not careful we could create a self-replicating nano-bot that could eat everything in the world, replacing it with copies of itself. This is known as the grey goo scenario.

While grey goo is still a far-off threat, I can see an analogous scenario unfolding on the Web. An increasing amount of cyberspace is taken up by Web 2.0 applications: Live Journal, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Bebo, Quechup, Flickr ... the list is endless. Not only is much of the "content" in these services devoid of real content, it is also self-replicating, just like grey goo. For example, I have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and of course LJ. I have arranged things so that anything I write on Twitter or LJ appears on my Facebook page (and thus on the home pages of any of my Facebook friends). I was about to also have my tweets appear on LJ, as many of my friends do, but then realised that they would then appear twice on Facebook: once as a Twitter feed and then again as a LJ feed. Now imagine an app that posts your Facebook updates to Twitter (after cutting them up into 148-character chunks). If no one has written it yet, someone soon will. So then you create an infinite loop, drowning all of your webspaces in a sea of tweets.

Now consider that someone is friends with you on Facebook, following you on Twitter, your minion on Bebo or whatever. They get all this garbage, of course. Normally what will happen then is that they'll block you, defriend you and generally curse your name, and it stops there. But consider what happens if they are such a fan of yours that they have an application which automatically retweets your tweets, shares your Facebook posts and so forth. I don't know if such an application exists, but like I said, if no one has written it, someone soon will. No web application is so useless that no one will design it—that's what the spirit of Web 2.0 is all about. While your lethal tweet is racing around your own social sites, it is periodically cloning itself onto your friends' sites and thence throughout the web. Within a short period of time, the whole of the web could be full of a hideous mashup of meaningless tweets.