#FutureTech: The Attack of the HashTags

If the frequent use of ‘gr8’ or ‘ROTFL’ in your daughter’s texts irritates you, and the addition of ‘twerking’ to the Oxford English dictionary broke your heart, you are officially a language snob. #getoveritalready.

 And you, my friend, are a dwindling lot. Because the future of social-enable communications is all about ‘making it shorter and sweeter.’ Taking the idea forward, Slate.com recently released a four-minute mockumentary that takes micro-blogging and twitter-mania to the next level. The video titled Flutter: the Next Twitter describes a new Twitter-inspired spoof site that is described, in the words of its own creators, as thus: “If twitter is microblogging, that would make us nano blogging.”

 The premise of the parody is simple: Flutter would allow users to post or “flap”, as they call it, but limit the number of characters down to 26! If at 140 characters, you felt Twitter was limiting, you’re so not feeling the pulse of the day. After all, the Internet means fast right? So who’s got the time to read more than a hundred characters?

 And don’t miss the part when they talk about Flutter Eyes, the ‘highly sophisticated eye glasses’ modeled to revolutionize mobile blogging. Wonder where the inspiration for THAT came from.

Albeit, made in jest, Flutter does hold a lot of potential of coming true. And before you protest, take a minute and scan the trending hashtags for the day. Not just in twitter. Now, Facebook too has it. So does Instagram. And Pintrest. The list goes on.

 And as much as you might hate to admit it, it works. You know when some one tags #firstworldproblems, it’s going to a juvenile rant or exaggerated whine about their cat. Or that you must use the #ThankYouSachin if you want to declare your undying fandom to a retiring Tendulkar. And you know who #pappu is.

 If we have already dropped spaces between characters, how long would it be till we dropped the vowels too?