Sam

When you work online, there’s an unspoken rule… you have to be plugged in.

Obviously.

I mean, we describe ourselves as “social media gurus” and “online experts” and get those less plugged in to pay us for our ability to use SEO and UGC and other hot TLAs casually in conversation, without mixing the letters around. Clearly, it’s not just hip to be ahead… it’s required.

And it’s not like we didn’t know this was coming. It’s been over a year since we all started the “Facebook is SO boring” genuflect, and started reducing our thoughts to 140 characters. Blog traffic whoring became follower fucking… with massive #followfriday meltdowns and speed competitions on how fast you could  tweet the most links on “10 Tips to Tweet it Up in the Twitterverse!” We got to post “I am so OVER Facebook” on our status updates, follow our friends frantically, sycophantically reply to @ev and @pogue and generally tweet so much that our iPhones got all hot and sticky.  We were ahead of the curve on the Next Big Thing, and boy, were we proud of it.

But ever since @ev flipped open his laptop to win over @oprah, and @aplusk popped that champagne cork… people, we’re a little screwed.

Or maybe it’s just me. But #deepbreathehere… I don’t know what The Next Big Thing is yet.

Honestly? I am a little scared.  To calm myself down, I indulged in a little online warm up, i.e.: some of those ‘More_about_me’ blog quizzes. Then…

• I cleaned out my Facebook inbox. (Really? My nursery school classmates started a ’76 group? How to prove Capetonians are parochial, folks.)
• I also trawled my professional network to make sure I was thoroughly LinkedIn, and then double-backed through Huddlemind.
• I signed up smartly for gatorpeeps. I blued my World. I blipped the Grid, I downloaded demos of the Wave.
• I also signed up for PeopleJar and Ning and Blogher and… well, I don’t remember the names of all of them, but if you are going to search the members of Possibly The Next Big Thing – I am pretty sure I’m there. In name and avatar, at least.
• I put my money behind FriendFeed, because aggregation in the new authenticity, only to be left completely cold. (It may be cool, but I’d like to see someone make aggregation sexy.)

The 140-char take home?  @SamWilson1:  Help. Where do the cool kids go, now that Twitter has gone all plebeian? Please tell me, else I may get fired/look stupid/be uncool. #smugfucksonline

Gosh. I feel much better saying that out loud. Now I can go back to doing what I actually do for a living – talking to assorted people about nebulous stuff. Which, and colour me silly, is what I thought this whole social networking lark was about in the first place.

Sam Wilson is the Editor-in-Chief of Women24, Food24 and Parent24, and is socially networked up the wazoo, whilst having a tongue as foul as tar.