Can I get an AMEN?!?! Ross Levinsohn from Velocity Interactive Group just said that the widget market will be dramatically consolidated in 12-18 months as a standalone concept. Widgets are tools for distributing viral content, and there will be a huge shakeout, leaving just the companies that do it well.

What is content anyway? Does “poking” someone on Facebook equal content? What about a “tweet” on Twitter? Blending communication and content spawns new forms of media that need to be looked at differently. “Blogging is content, but sending the same information via twitter isn’t quite the same thing.”

Velocity won’t be investing in other social networks or portals. They are looking forward to what’s next, rather than competitors to current market leaders such as YouTube, MySpace & Facebook or the portals. Up next for them is finding “focused consumers.” Being able to target video well will be key to justifying the money spent in online video. When that happens, really big dollars will flow into online video.

First off, Twitter is a great idea. But it was only really good at the start. Unlike most new technologies it got worse with scale. First with slowdowns and outages as they added features, then as a result of information overload as more people came online.

I don’t know that I entirely agree with Scott Carp that it is a massive waste of time. But I appreciate his saying so because I have used Twitter less and less lately. The problem is that relevance is very hard to realize until you have it. Twitter may be a conversation ecosystem, but it’s neither a successful intermediary nor a compete medium.

Carp points to the issue of only getting half of a conversation, but that’s only part of it, the main problem is it needs to find a way to be all things to all people, and despite improvements and growth it has failed to achieve that with scale.

Twitter became an easy way to follow people we know and respect. But it’s not the most efficent way. It’s a work in progress, but the issue as with most of the long tail is one of the filter. Without a better way of sorting what goes through it, it’s just an additional stream of mostly unnecessary data.