To me, this feels like when Murdoch bought MySpace, back in 2005. Whether he drove it into the ground or whether it was ready to die on it's own, that buyout happened to coincide with the rise of facebook, which caused the end of the old web 2.0 era. At the time, Murdoch's buyout didn't look that crazy, but looking back on it, we wonder what he was thinking. I think the same thing will happen if Twitter gets bought out by a rich asshole with more money than brains. This attempted buyout seems like a sign of some big changes coming soon. Maybe it's a sign that Twitter and Facebook are going under soon, and will be replaced with something new?
What could replace them? IDK, I'm not good at predicting these things. If I had to guess, though: I think web sites have been on the precipice of big change for a while now. Web sites are no longer just documents. They are more like applications, and browsers are more like virtual machines. Nobody wants to trust an app from the app stores, which is partly why wordle got so big. That's a sign of things to come. Somebody is going to exploit the new capabilities that are available in web development. Maybe the sensor revolution will come to web development in a big way? Maybe installing video games or applications will become a thing of the past, since everything can be done in a web page? It's kind of software as a service, but kind of more than that, since the code is running locally, in the browser. You aren't remote streaming your favorite video games like with Onlive or something, though, so it's not exactly software as a service. What does that mean? IDK yet.
That's just a general idea of where I think online culture could go if Twitter and Facebook were to fall like Myspace did after Murdoch bought it, or how Digg went under abruptly some time around 2010.
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