After leaving the stage at our local dive bar, a touring musician meandered over to our table, sat down, and dropped his business card among our food and drinks. While he chatted up my associates, I became enraptured with the business card, not because of its design nor because of the musician himself; the card cited not one, not two, not three, but <em>four </em>URLs through which one could follow this fellow's repertoire. In addition to his home page, the musician had listed his Facebook page, his MySpace page, and, of course, his Twitter page.[1. Normally, I would link to the musician's pages, but this musician has a fundamental issue; basically, he's not much of a musician.] Conspicuously absent, much to my amusement, was his email address.[2. But email is sooo passé.]

While I flipped the card over and over in my fingers within that particular bar, I recalled that just a few hours before, I had noticed that one of  my other favorite drinking holes had plastered upon its window addresses  to its Facebook and Twitter accounts. Then I remembered that my own blog provides a link to <a title="RSS feed" href="http://www.biggles2k.com/blog/?feed=rss2">its RSS feed</a> and <a title="My Twitter feed" href="http://twitter.com/biggles2k" target="_blank">my own Twitter feed</a>. [3. Though they are subtle, at best. Hover over the little corners beneath the big brain at the top of my page.] And should some interested readers wish to do so, they can share my posts on nearly a dozen social networks.

<em>Really?</em> my aging self thought. <em>Has it come to this? Is our attention so divided amongst the Web that we must throw out as many URLs as possible in order to capture the attention of others? What happened to the single URL, the single web site?</em>

I continued to think about it--perhaps a little bit more slowly than usual since the thoughts swam among a few beers--and decided that a single URL may be good enough to which to direct people, but a single path of communication, of which a URL represents, simply is not sufficient. Not necessarily an original thought, of course: Multiple avenues of communication has been the domain of advertisers for, well, as long as advertising have been around. But I had always considered the Web as just one fork in our many paths of communication. Now it seems that the Web itself has forked. Not necessarily surprising since, after all, the Web itself is simply one fork among many in the Internet.

Thus I began thinking about each path and what lay at the end of it, and I've concluded that like many explorations in life, the end of these paths is what you make of it. Take me, for example. I've found Twitter to be completely useless, much in the same way I found RSS feeds useless: Information overload. I've tried following some Twitter feeds, but I encountered the same problem when I tried condensing various news sources within an RSS aggregator. Even when I'd check in regularly, I'd find myself spending a ridiculous amount of time sorting through information that I just didn't care about it. For me, it's equivalent to having an Instant Messenger client displaying the conversations of all of my buddies even when I'm not participating.

Facebook suffers the same flaw. My news feed is an onslaught of information I don't need to know. I love my friends, and I love the fact that I connect to them in an instant with Facebook, but I'm not that concerned about a friend's preference of pumpkin seed milk over soy milk, nor their efforts in any <a title="Zynga--I hesitate to link to them" href="http://www.zynga.com/games/" target="_blank">name-a-Zynga-game-here</a>.

Yet despite my abhorrence, these two venues thrive and will continue to thrive. Some decry them as fads; I think they might be here to stay. Even if they don't, next to Google, they are currently the main avenues for promoting and receiving information over the Web.  And good Webmasters will know how to take advantage of them.

So what is an aging Webmaster, such as myself, to do? Reluctantly, curmudgeonly, I have realized I need to start re-exploring these well-traveled trails of communication. This doesn't mean I have to pepper my business card with four URLs; however, should I stick to a single URL, it had better make others.