Social media seems pretty big, huh? Still kind of shiny and new. Every new bit of func­tion­al­ity is excit­ing and worth a blog post or tweet.

One thing that still stops me from fully embrac­ing the social media uni­verse is some­thing that goes hand in hand with its nov­elty. Peo­ple are still exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent forms of it — which is good — but  it reminds me of the exchange in Some­thing About Mary:

Hitch­hiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excer­cise video.
Hitch­hiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Lis­ten to this: 7… Minute… Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you’re going.
Hitch­hiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sit­tin’ there, there’s 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitch­hiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guar­an­tee just as good a work­out as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guar­an­tee it? That’s — how do you do that?
Hitch­hiker: If you’re not happy with the first 7 min­utes, we’re gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That’s it. That’s our motto. That’s where we’re comin’ from. That’s from “A” to “B”.
Ted: That’s right. That’s — that’s good. That’s good. Unless, of course, some­body comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you’re in trou­ble, huh?
[Hitch­hiker con­vulses]
Hitch­hiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody’s comin’ up with 6. Who works out in 6 min­utes? You won’t even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That — good point.

There were blogs, then there were social media sites like Face­book; then there were microblogs like tum­blr, and then there was twit­ter and its ilk. I think there’s a good chance that we’ve reached the crit­i­cal mass of ‘blog­ging; most of the new advances will be aggre­ga­tion ser­vices, such as ping​.fm and flockr. As we all know, new media spawns alter­na­tives. VHS and Beta­max; HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Until “the peo­ple” make a choice, we’ll con­tinue to see sites lit­tered with mil­lions of social media badges.

I’m not insin­u­at­ing that social media has a Highlander-like demand for there to be only one. I’m just point­ing out that there’s a lot of redun­dancy out there. As an exam­ple, I was dis­cussing tum­blr with Martha Sperry on twit­ter and we were weigh­ing tumblr’s func­tion and for­mat against a tra­di­tional blog and twit­ter. It finally occurred to me that all the func­tion­al­ity in tum­blr exists on Facebook’s wall; and with Face­book you already have the built-in net­work­ing functionality.

Dis­cus­sion Question:

Does an extended quote from a movie count as a “movie ref­er­ence”? Explain.