[humorix] New Startup Aims To Make Twitter Obsolete

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

New Startup Aims To Make Twitter Obsolete
April 14, 2009

Who really needs 140 characters?  That's the question posed by the 
founder of "Wordr", a new dotcom aiming to replace Twitter as the 
messaging service of choice for people that don't really have anything 
worthwhile to say.

"Looking at the history of networking, it's obvious that less is more," 
explained company founder Les Clue.  "First we had email, with nearly 
unlimited capacity for attachments.  Then we had various chat systems, 
with much smaller message capacities."

He continued, "That evolved into Twitter with its 140 character limit, 
clearly a modern marvel of message size shrinkage.  But thanks to our 
company's patent-pending technological breakthroughs, we have now pushed 
the envelope to its logical conclusion: messages with only one word. 
Twitter is so 2008.  The future is Wordr."

In the Wordr system, participants send one-word messages called "Whirs." 
While it may be tempting to send multiple messages in a row to create a 
sentence, that practice is frowned upon by Wordrs.

"Brevity is the soul of wit, or something," Clue said. "All you really 
need is one word."

This reporter naively asked, "But it took you two whole sentence to 
respond.  How could you have possibly condensed that into one word?"

"Get bent!" was the response.

"But that's two words.  I imagine most insults require at least two 
words. How can you have a quality messaging system where such things are 
so difficult?"

"FU!" was the response.  He added, "See?  That's one word! Well, 
actually it's an abbreviation for two words, but you get the idea. 
Wordr is like haiku: the format is very constrained, but you can still 
say anything you like."

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that early Wordr adopters have 
already developed complicated abbreviations and acronyms to fit within 
the one-word paradigm.  [Eww, did I just write "paradigm"?  I feel so 
dirty.]

For example, "Isottram" means "I'm sitting on the toilet reading a 
magazine", a very common idiom among Wordr users.  Also: "Brbftb" or "Be 
right back from the bathroom."

Other popular words include "Dywcomt" (Do you want Chinese or Mexican 
tonight?"), "Ijwtlhomlwdwts" (I just wasted the last hour of my life 
watching 'Dancing With The Stars'"), and of course, "Wymmaetlv" ("Will 
you marry me and elope to Las Vegas?").

It seems difficult to imagine that such a cumbersome system could make 
it big. However, I had the same feelings about Twitter, and I'm 
apparently the last person on the planet who hasn't become a Twit.

Jon Splatz, Humorix's Social Commentator When He Isn't Out To Lunch Yet 
Again, offered his opinion on Wordr: "Well, we've always been told that 
'the medium is the message.'  Thanks to the rapidly shortening attention 
spans of most Internet users, Wordr should be quite successful."


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