Why social media need to go to the next stage and how twitter may become the communication norm

For fans of social media,this month's wired has a couple of articles that are worth a read.

David Chartier writes that for

the social web to evolve into its final stage and take flight, the walls that separate these services(of the different mediums), their users and everything they create will have to come down.

adding that sites such as Facebook and MySpace has a certain similarity to that of Aol back in the earlier days of the net.

He quotes the words of words of Forrester Researcher Jeremiah Owyang,

"the inhabitants of today's isolated social networks will adopt a more useful social experience" by importing cool stuff from the wider web. But, he emphasizes, "they'll still be stuck on those islands."

Meanwhile Julian Dibbel takes a close look at Twitter asking

knowing how people use Twitter isn't the same thing as knowing why they use it. And that turns out to be a puzzle even seasoned Twitter watchers have found difficult to crack.

Although the 140 character message has been dismissed as an inadequate way of communicating,he reminds us that in the early days of TV,that medium was written off

as a time waster with few redeeming social or cultural values:

however

TV became a powerful change agent regardless of, or even in spite of, the programming. The medium was the message.

by forcing users to commit their thinking to the bite-size form of the public tweet, Twitter may be giving a powerfully productive new life to a hitherto underexploited quantum of thought: The random, fleeting observation.