From Ivor Tossell's Globe and Mail column:

In 2004, the rise of blogs and their newfound political power gripped the public attention. In 2005, Wikipedia and the virtues of crowdsourcing announced themselves to the general public. In 2006, YouTube mushroomed into an online-video juggernaut, and ushered in a new age of user-generated cat videos. In 2007, Facebook went from college diversion to mainstream phenomenon.

And now, it's the end of 2008, and here she comes, the latest Miss Internet Hoopla. Today, everybody is facing the imperative of signing up to Twitter, the service that has just sashayed away with the crown.

Twitter is a micro-blog – a blogging service where every entry is teeny-tiny. It's rather like posting Facebook status updates, but mercifully liberated from the concept of “friendship.” On Twitter, you don't have to be somebody's friend to read their thoughts; you just have to be interested in what they have to say. I have a theory about this: Facebook is about people you used to know; Twitter is about people you'd like to know better.

Like most winners in the pageant's brief and querulous history, Twitter had already been around for a while by the time it got big. It was somewhere around the middle of 2008, however, that it hit that critical mass of users able to bring it into the mainstream. (In mathematical terms, I call it the “whoop-de-do number”: the point at which any given website has amassed enough users to become a great, freaking whoop-de-do.) So, when pageant time came around, it aced every event.