GregHay.com

Blame James Gross for getting me thinking about this.

James asked in his post yesterday what is the New New Thing? Looking at the lifespan of each of the last three big emerging trends (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) and how long they each spent in the limelight being the “hot” thing, James asked how could we guess what’s next. He asked if search data or some other tool monitoring online discussion and/or activity might identify the next emerging “hot” thing. I think it’s a decent hypothesis, if we bloggers didn’t totally muck it up for James. And I’m about to throw my hat in the ring and become part of the problem.

You can’t discuss Twitter without saying, “twitter” and there in lies the problem. We all add to the buzz and drive outlandish hockey stick charts that end up driving these “hot” trends. Not by getting involved and using the platforms, but instead just by discussing them. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, we chat about it therefore it must be the thing to be doing. Are we doing more harm than good? Perhaps.

First Problem
We’re too quick to call something dead. MySpace isn’t in the dead pool yet, it still has lots of traffic, is making improvements and just this week decided to challenge Yelp for local business information. But if you asked an “expert”, they’d tell you it’s dead. Why? Because we don’t talk about it anymore, but the audience that has remained loyal to the MySpace experience doesn’t care that Scott Smigler wrote in ’06 that the long tail of Facebook (what?!?! That doesn’t even make sense) will kill Murdock’s little site that could.

Now, we’re doing the same to Facebook. We’re having the same discussion and saying that the real-time web and Twitter will kill it. I happen to agree that the web will go real-time but I don’t think it’s going to be Twitter that kills Facebook.

But look at the chart above, we’re still making the same arguments and feeding into the buzz about things “being over” when clearly they aren’t. They just are for us early adopters.

Second Problem
We ALL blog about the Next Big Thing. I have my own thoughts and I’ll clearly be adding to that graph in the future. I’ll give you a hint in this post, more to come later. Google answers questions by pointing you to sites that have them. My “Next Big Thing” will be when content answers my question, no matter where or when it’s produced. (full post to come)

Third Problem
All we do is guess. There are SO many bloggers out there and this is what we do, 4% of all blog posts contain guessing!

So James, where’s the next big thing going to come from and how are we going to know where to look? I think the Next Next Thing is going to come to us by changing “how” we look, not where. Timeline by MicroPlaza has us started down the road, listen to your friends, they’ll find it.