It figures. Just when everyone felt the need to have a Facebook page, along comes Twitter to remind you that you are, in fact, well behind the curve. I knew Facebook had reached the popular culture tipping point of practical necessity when my mother-in-law (who is an avid Skype video call user) wondered aloud whether it was necessary to use Facebook to keep in touch with her grandkids. It is. Whether grandma really wants to see the day-to-day drama of the high schoolers or the photographic evidence of the altered states at college is another story.

Now Twitter has grown past the early-adopters and moved into the mass media. At 8 million users and some ridiculous amount of growth every day, the question of whether anyone really wants to read that you’re standing on line at the grocery, or that the french toast is ‘yummy’, has been rendered moot. If enough of your friends and colleagues are using a technology, so must you lest you be tagged a “Luddite“. Now the question is what to post, at what frequency and in which media. The difficulty of managing the non-stop stream of links to interesting articles, ruminations on current events, and promotional announcements has led to the proliferation of tools like Hootsuite, Twhirl, Tweetdeck, and a thousand more. Today’s new flavor is Twibes, where you can throw your remaining individuality into the bin and join (or create) a group of like-minded folks. It’s the segmentation of Twitter and is built-to-order for marketers to reach identifiable groups for push marketing.

What is clear is that thousands and thousands of individuals and businesses are jumping on this platform to avoid being left at the station. Only a few of the folks that I follow appear to have a clear purpose around their use of Twitter – I know I don’t. Even marketing guru Seth Godin doesn’t use Twitter (or Facebook or Flickr or MySpace), for this primary reason:

“I don’t want to use a tool unless I’m going to use it really well. Doing any of these things halfway is worse than not at all. People don’t want a mediocre interaction.”

I work in the online employment and recruiting business. Figuring out how to leverage the multitude of third-party social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Facebook, etc. is one of the biggest challenges we face. It is not implausible that online job boards will find themselves swept aside by changing technology in the same way that the newspaper classifieds were kicked to the curb. In the case of newspapers, it took over 150 years to have their employment ad revenue model wiped-out by craigslist and Monster. The online job boards might find that it takes far less time to be left behind. It remains to be seen whether the combined 180+ million users of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter will have an answer to Godin’s challenge of using a tool “really well” and if, at the end of the day, that really matters.