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This is not a new subject, but just like everything on the hype curve, I’ve recently noticed more people asking “Can Twitter last and what’s next?”

The answer: Yes and no . And what’s next is whatever people decide to hype, but what’s logically next may be pretty cool.

Short format
Twitter has been a great leap forward in public adoption of short message format. This shift in attitude toward short messages will be valuable in the long run, as parsing content into small and discrete ideas means that content can be reassembled in various contexts that provide meaning to the consumers. (Eventually this small content will have enough patterns to map its relevancy to other content. Depending upon what you’re looking for and what we already know about you, we can predict what you really want and find the most current and relevant content. Semantic Web in a nutshell. )

How does Twitter fit into this? Whether it’s Twitter or any other SMS application, content is still contributed 140 characters at a time. It may be links to full articles. It may be ideas or it may be inane lifestreaming. (In this model, I predict that lifestreaming as a pastime goes away, as internet personas become less important.)

The idea of following people or watching a tweetstream of random messages becomes a diversion of the totally geeked or the truly bored.

Immediacy. In most cases, immediate information is not important. In a catastrophe, immediate information can be useful to someone who is engaged in the event. But to the common voyeur, the appeal of immediate communication is the ability to report/retweet the news first; not to provide help in any way.

Satisfaction. Short messages are easy to create and easy to digest – but in quick succession and without something to tie them together, fragmented ideas rely on the consumer to file mentally and to reassemble cognitively… hopefully before another set of message fragments steal attention and divert the brain to a new subject.

Following tweets from your tweeps is listening to a police scanner. You monitor everything and stop when you see something interesting. That model won’t last.

The union of traditional search for knowledge with the scale and speed of the internet

The future is more like a newspaper, an encyclopedia or the town crier, personalized and on demand.
Dynamic. Content should not only be relevant for the user, but updated and dynamic – Depending on the user’s changing perspective, the world’s changing information and the context for which a user is seeking knowledge, content should adjust. SMS allows the content to be broken up in to small enough pieces to be dynamic. Semantic data relationships are in charge of assembling it.
Trustworthy. Content needs to be trustworthy .. sometimes. Generally, people want accurate information, but there’s a difference between factoids for party conversation and real research. The capacity to assemble content from authoritative sources in addition to user-generated sources will continue to need balance.
Contextual. Data and short messages can have semantic relationships, but there also needs to be a contextual interpretation. Why does data X relate to data Z? Peanut butter is food. Spaghetti is food. So what? I have peanut butter, spaghetti and rat poison in my cupboard, and I’m hungry. “Stuff in my cupboard” returns related data, but it’s out of context and, in this case, not helpful.

Subjects, not people
Rather than following other people, we will begin to follow subjects and be able to refine relevancy.
None of this is new. Technology doesn’t change culture. Culture uses technology in ways that hasten change.

Following interest in subjects is not a new idea. The technology to assemble related content exists, although it lacks widespread adoption. Putting all of these things together hopefully will be a return to a society that values knowledge and wisdom over superficial fame and self indulgence. I hope that means that American Idol is canceled.