Twitter, you can go home now

When will Twitter’s 15 minutes of fame in sports finally come to an end?

If you’re Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, you’re probably hoping it’ll be quite soon.

Cuban, ever the target of fines from the NBA for his habitual complaints about officiating, turned over a new leaf by switching to Twitter’s 140 characters to grumble about Denver Nuggets guard J.R. Smith not getting a technical foul on Friday night for a perceived taunt of a Mavericks player.

The new media platform didn’t matter to the NBA, and Cuban was slapped with a $25,000 fine in what Cuban later called – on Twitter, of course – the first instance of someone using the social networking tool to earn money.

Take that, non-profiting Twitter founders!

Moreover, Twitter has apparently become the new blog of 2009. Anyone who thinks they’re anyone has jumped aboard the text-messaging utility to spew thoughts ranging from halftime analysis (Milwaukee Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva) to injury updates (cyclist Lance Armstrong).

Me? I went down the Twitter road nearly a year ago and lost my lust for it within a week. Yet in the past month – let’s call it an international Twitter-palooza – I’ve received 20 new followers to a feed that hasn’t been updated since last May.

And frankly, I’m at the point where knowing that Phoenix Suns guard Steve Nash (The_Real_Nash) is hosting a charity event doesn’t mean anything for my daily life.

Granted, I’m not exactly an example of an over-the-top sports fan looking for the latest personal scoop on my favorite players.

I’m not going to bake Los Angeles Lakers’ forward Luke Walton a birthday cake and send the photo to him, nor am I inclined to care at all about what Washington Redskins tight end Chris Cooley has to say on his personal blog. (Cooley, of course, earned a nice dose of unwanted publicity last fall when he posted a photo of him that inadvertently caught a glimpse of his man parts. Oops.)

I did, however, enjoy the beginnings of Shaquille O’Neal’s Twitter feed – if you haven’t seen it, search ‘The Real Shaq’ – that featured some mild commentary on games and commercials while also offering random acts of ticket kindness in cities he was playing in that night.

Today, Shaq’s Twitter has almost gotten too big for its own good, with the superstar center replying to a heavy number of people on a daily basis (readers see only half of the conversation) and a reduction in funny comments as the feed’s novelty starts to wear off.

The likely culprit, of course, is very similar to most social networking platforms in the past few years.

The first two weeks are great because you rant and rave about a good no-name movie and think that other people (friend or otherwise) care that you have a haircut at 4:30 p.m today.

The creative honeymoon soon ends, and it becomes painfully obvious that your friends just don’t care that it’s feeding time for your goldfish.

Is that honeymoon ending in the near future for professional athletes and celebrities? After all, we’ve learned that a lot of these folks aren’t really posting to their own account and instead have finger-happy PR folks create authentic-looking Tweets.
The answer? Probably not.

And that, of course, won’t be good news for Cuban.

Here’s to you, Twitter. May your fall come as quickly as your rise – one that lacked real substance and harbored a place for the thoughts of athletes I don’t really care about it.

I’ll take my 15 minutes back, please.