I’ve been feeling a little Twitter exhaustion lately and I’ve noticed some of you have too. It made me stop and ask myself a question: What’s next? Take a look at the tag cloud of this very blog. What jumps out at you? Twitter, Facebook — try and find one more and, yes, there it is — MySpace, and in that order of frequency too. Twitter is the IT network (yes that’s a pun) of the moment (and yes, even with Facebook’s shiny new mug).

I’m not here to deny Twitter’s permanent utility; in fact I’ll be back in a week or so to defend it. But what I am here to say is that overall Twitter, like most of its predecessors, will take a beating sooner or later from the victor of the next social media undercard. And with the telescoping of social and technological evolutions, I’d say it’ll be sooner rather than later — cough FriendFeed cough. Just in time for mom and dad to realize they’re still out of touch and for brands and businesses to scramble out of one strategy and into another.

And even FriendFeed, if that is the next craze of the masses, will become obsolete before you’ve known it. And so the question for me becomes — are we moving so fast and processing so much, so insatiably now, that this is the pace of the social media shelf life? My friends and I joke about singularity, so I won’t take it seriously here, but I do want to ask you what the benefits are if we only have enough time to realize we’ve passed what we’re looking at? I know it’s confusing. It should be at ludicrous speed.