Facebook just added a small Twitter bird to its farm on Farmville

I'm a longstanding Twitter skeptic.

I'm convinced that its importance is vastly over-blown by the media industry itself, especially lazy journalists who use it as a quick barometer of opinion. Nobody "real" actually seems to use it, just a few people who either like talking to themselves, or who like the external validation of lots of "followers" (celebrities, politicians, social media commentators and other assorted narcissists). Some of my friends in the tech PR community have also succumbed to it, despite my attempts at re-educating them.

So I found it deeply amusing that an even more annoying social web phenomenon has now grown much larger than Twitter - the intensely irritating Farmville apparently has 69m users - a subset of Facebook's 350m. I'm one of the other 280m who've switched off all Farmville notifications from our addicted friends.

An early prediction for 2010-11: Twitter falters a bit..... then gets acquired by some wannabe media-turned-social-media company... then disappears into a black hole to join PointCast, FriendsReunited, Second Life and Friendster as one of the long list of Internet has-beens. And it's joined shortly thereafter by Farmville as well, in a pleasing sort of symmetry.