Traditional media’s adoption of social media

Think about the following platforms and when the first traditional media activity/participation occurred in that platform’s history: Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Chatroulette. It was a shorter and shorter period for each platform.*

Let’s call this the adoption half-life. It’s a bastardization of Moore’s Law, but the level of adoption required for a social platform to be covered as The Next Big Thing in social platforms will continue to decrease until NBT status is bestowed upon a platform used only by those in the media.

I’d been writing a post about this that wasn’t coming out the way I wanted, so I shelved it until I saw The Onion’s take on last fall’s New York Times’ take on Foursquare. Then I decided to jam 2 posts together.

The Onion sums this all up way more succinctly:

Aging, scared newspapermen throw themselves at the latest mobile technology trend in a humiliatingly futile attempt to remain relevant.

For his part, Foursquare founder, Dennis Crowley, had this to say:

Um, The Onion poking fun of @foursquare (and me). This is the greatest moment of my entire life.

*If someone has a LexisNexis account and can find the first mention of these platforms, I’d be grateful, but since this is the internet, I don’t need sources, mirite?

• Chatroulette
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• Friendster
• Myspace
• Tumblr
• Twitter