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 individual's repertoire. In addition to his home page, the musician had listed his Facebook page, his MySpace page, and, of course, his Twitter page. Conspicuously absent, much to my amusement, was his email address.[1. 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 its RSS feed and my own Twitter feed. [2. 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 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 determined that like many explorations in life, the end of these paths is what you make of it. The usefulness of Facebook is different for each individual. As is the usefulness of Twitter. And therefore, both are completely useless to a lot of people.

Like many folks, I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. I love it because it's connected me to long-lost friends. I hate it because of Farmville and because I really don't care if you've just read a great novel while on the toilet (but I mostly hate it because of Farmville).

So what is an aging Webmaster to do? Reluctantly, curmudgeonly, I have realized I need to start exploring these well-traveled trails of communication.