Very few "social media sites" of any age have actually gone down. Livejournal is still there; ProBoards is still there; even Myspace is still there. (The exception is Usenet, which got eaten by Yahoo.) I don't think there's much chance Twitter will actually vanish in the near future.

But it will be - it is - losing the people who make it worth using. I go on Twitter to read what the people I follow are writing; if they're not writing anything, I won't open the site any more, because why would I? That's how LJ died, for instance - too many friends drifted off it, so that it was no longer worth looking at daily.

That is already happening. The people I follow for long history threads have moved half their content to alternate sites - which means there's only half, or less than half, for me to read on Twitter. Artists are no longer bothering to post pictures. Bloggers are announcing their new blog posts elsewhere, and not writing up threads about them. Twitter is less of a one-stop shop for entertainment and news, and more something I check once or twice a day to see if the few people who are still fully there have said anything funny.

hS