Flutter...parody or prophet?

After watching this parody of Twitter, I had two thoughts enter my head. The first was that at least there’s no possible way that it would ever happen in reality and that Twitter is the lowest we shall ever sink into this pit of useless micro-blogging. There’s no way that the average viewer of this video – I’m guessing a 16 to 26year old Internet geek – would ever think that this is a good idea. No one could possibly want a world in which his or her micro-blogger of choice would automatically update. No one really wants to read blogs using the bottom of their glasses. No one really wants to write out his entire day using just 26 characters right? No one really wants to look as dumb as the users of this stuff in the video...right?

This video today reminded me of an old Saturday Night Live skit from the first season of the show. I had only recently watched it all and found the commercial parodies to be extremely funny. The commercial in question was an ad for a “4 bladed razor… Guaranteed to give you an extra close shave that you just couldn’t get with a 2-blade razor. The 4 blade razor... because you will believe anything…” The razor I now use daily is a Gillette Fusion Razor with 4 main blades and a trimming blade for details. This means at some time during the past 34 years that SNL has been on the air, we have now met and surpassed the parody. This fear was hinted at the end of the Flutter video when the intern was going to make an even crazier system that even outdoes the parody. So after coming to terms with the fact that this WILL happen at some point I decided to find out how close this is to becoming reality. Well...first let’s see if people could write stuff with the limit of 26 characters.


“playd rockband all day LOL”

“got really drunk at party!”

“failed blu book test :’-( “

Each of these are 26 characters with the spaces…..


This sadly seems like something a person who twitters would not mind doing. After just a quick search on Google I quickly found the reading glasses and instant update systems already in the works. There are glasses with video screens built in, and there are apps that add your GPS to Twitter. The parody seems more like a sad prophecy now. I guess some questions about why we need such things could be asked. I personally have to just rationalize it as the way things progress. We are going to continue to learn of new inventions coming from older ideas. We will not always see why they were created and if they were needed. It will just happen.