What a Tangled Web We Weave, Right?

Where do I start this post?
At the beginning I suppose.

When the web first entered my life, it was all such a wonderful thing. The possibilities were endless! New friends! New Frontiers! WOW!
At first, we were all buying domains. Websites. You had to have a website to have it going on. You might have joined a newsgroup and you had yourself some email. For a time, this was status quo. If you wanted to project yourself and participate in the online community, you presented yourself in a website.
This lasted for awhile, maybe even a decade. People had websites. This was a daunting thing. To create a site, you needed some kind of knowledge, some software, a domain. To have a domain, it required money. Money isn't very diplomatic really. So quite a few people who wanted to have a presence on the internet probably were left out right away due to the cash. And others, they were left out because the knowledge or software to build a site was not on their radar.
Then came the bloggers. To blog, you needed no money. There were places such as blogger or Live Journal...where you could sign up and have a page and a web presence right now, with no money, no software, and little knowledge. It seemed so much more fair and equal. The format is so much more diplomatic. And easy! Hell, you didn't have to learn code, java, flash scripting, or anything more complicated then typing, and finding your image on your hard drive and uploading it. Presto chango! Instant web presence! This really was/is a nice format. People had online diaries of sorts, instead of animations and crazy pages leading to galleries. You put your story your pic up...and you shared with friends and fam. Nice set up. For a little while, the blogs ruled. RULED.
Being the good little Webbie that I am, I have followed these popular web trends right along...I have had a website for 9 years. And I used to be quite faithful about updating it and arranging it and all that. Then came the blogs...Live Journal, Blogger. And I ended up in a fervor over them instead. The website still remains. But a shadow of it's former self. The blog thing has worked for a time, too.
But ...along came the twitter.
Twitter, that tweaky little application that allows for 140 characters of quality conversation at a time. (not sure its 140...but it is limited to a certain amount of characters.) Everything you have to say is distilled into this little tidbit of relevance. And of course, I got on twitter and have done tweets now for a few weeks now.
And in between these little movements, in the background, there was the myspace phenomenon. And then all the little ning groups and social groups that were formed to help us all niche our interests. Next came monster time gobbler Facebook--and the inevitable exodus from Myspace.... Then within Facebook everyone plays the 'Lil Green Patch Game. Till someone develops Farm Town Game....and the inevitable exodus from Lil Green Patch....groan. It's starting to seem endlessly tiring. This chasing of the pack. I feel like I am in a herd. I am following everyone around and lately I am starting to get dizzy from it all.
What a tangled web we weave!!!
With some retrospection, I think I should have done things differently. Why am I following? I am independent, and if anything, I am a leader, not a follower. So wtf> ? I can't figure out my own behavior. I am not the herd type.

We started with websites that provided for all sorts of sharing of ourselves. It took time to make a site, and equally it took time to explore one.
With blogs, it was less involvement. Sure, you could customize things, but it was within the framework of what you were already given. Text, pictures, that's about the limit of the experience, unless you linked off to somewhere else thru your travels.
Then with twitter, there is even less being shared. Small simple comments, mostly without context. Utterances. We have reduced the sharing of ourselves into this small sentence or two.
I know I have already posted about how overwhelmed the web makes me feel sometimes. Taking in all that information, all those pictures...it's dizzying, it really is. Perhaps by reducing our output and intake into these small tweets, we are adapting to that phenomenon. You only get this very small space of 140 characters--with no pics!--to express yourself. And then, by default, you can only put IN 140 characters at a time.
What does it all mean? Where is it all heading? I wish I knew.