I wrote a post a few weeks back begging the question “what happened to jump the shark?” Though TVGuide decided to turn what was an exceptional online community into Garbagefest 2009, another fan of the site decided to take the situation into their own hands and developed an awesome re-creation — BoneTheFish.com

Still new to the scene, this site brings all the same great features you used to see on JumpTheShark.com, but I’d argue the interface is a little cleaner with Bone The Fish. They don’t have every show listed as of yet, but if your favorite show isn’t there, you can submit it with a suggestion of when it Jumped The Shark, errr, Boned The Fish. While the actual term itself, “bone the fish” may never be part of our everyday vernacular like the term “jump the shark” became, the creators are doing a great job bringing back the greatness that was Jump The Shark.

Go check them out and sign up if you get a chance. You’ll notice there aren’t too many shows submitted yet, but with a community effort we can certainly help bring back an internet classic!

Over the weekend I came across a couple pretty cool Twitter directories, something that seems to have been lacking lately (especially since the simple “search” function on twitter’s homepage is pretty weak). One is twibs.com and the other is WeFollow.

Twibs.com is directory allowing you to find what businesses are on twitter. You can search by either a description of what you are looking for, such as “advertising agency chicago” or by name, like “whole foods”. It appears all submissions are manual, so you must submit your own listing. Get your business up as quickly as possible — since this service is fairly new you can probably appear on a couple valuable tags before the power users gobble them all up. You can also add a link to your company blog. BONUS: As of right now, it does not appear to have nofollow tags, and it is a business directory, so take that for what its worth.

WeFollow is a new twitter directory from Kevin Rose that allows you to find, well, anyone! Biggest problem right now is, you can only search by tag, not by name. You are limited to 3 tags to describe yourself, so choose wisely. I picked “chicago” “sem” and “hockey”. You have to manually submit your name, unless you are a power user like @THE_REAL_SHAQ or @MCHammer by replying to @WeFollow with your #tags. This was my submission. I like how WeFollow has some predefined, popular tags on the right side of the page. If you’re looking to follow certain #celebrities or are looking to connect with #bloggers, you’re only one click away.

Twitter directories have a lot of potential. I don’t think either of these are perfect but they are a step in the right direction to connect with others. I already use twitter as a real-time search engine, why not use it as a real-time friend finder, too?

Do you remember the sites you have gone to ever since you started being online? For me, I always remember imdb, Red Wings Central, Yahoo! and JumpTheShark.

I still often visit the sites above. Except for one. JumpTheShark.com, which, at some point within the last couple weeks, was redirected TVGuide.com/jumptheshark.

And it has become garbage.

For those of you who never visited jumptheshark.com, or are unfamiliar with the term, “jumping the shark” essentially means: the point in a TV series when it seems to have hit the peak. Or when something happens that isn’t quite right anymore.

Wikipedia defines it as:

Jumping the shark is a colloquialism used by TV critics and fans to denote that point in a TV show or movie series’ history where the plot veers off into absurd story lines or out-of-the-ordinary characterizations, particularly for a show with falling ratings apparently becoming more desperate to draw viewers in. In the process of undergoing these changes, the TV or movie series loses its original appeal. Shows that have “jumped the shark” are typically deemed to have passed their peak.

The term “jumping the shark” comes from the show “Happy Days”; the episode when The Fonz jumps over a shark while water skiing. Kind of a strange plot for a show that takes place primarily in a diner, don’t you think?

JumpTheShark.com was an awesome site. You could go there, type in your favorite TV show, and see when people believed it jumped the shark. One popular “jump” was from Seinfeld: when Larry David left the show. Another was The Office: when Pam and Jim finally started dating. Scrubs’ “jump” votes were always funny because the most popular jump the shark moment was season 3. Meaning, all of season 3 was a complete letdown.

That was the best part. If you didn’t agree with the votes, you could campaign for your own vote! There is nothing funnier than seeing someone admit and explain when their favorite show took a strange turn. Extreme passion coupled with an insane amount of frustration is a sight to be seen!

The point is, you could go there and see what people thought, leave comments, or suggest your own jumping moments. It was a great community, presumably one of the oldest on the web. I would argue the best and most creative comments throughout the internet’s existence were found on jumptheshark.com.

Sometime around 2006, the creator, Jon Heim decided to sell the site. More power to him, he created a product, sold it, and is now a millionaire. He sold it to tvguide.com. What they have done to it in the last 20 days or so is a complete slap in the face to the jumptheshark.com community. It has become a TV show gossip page! Don’t we already have enough of those already?

TVGuide – the channel – is a celebrity gossip channel.
TvGuide.com is a celebrity gossip site, with TV listings sprinkled in here and there.
Tvguide.com/jumptheshark (yes, they redirected jumptheshark.com to that subdirectory) is a NEW gossip page.

It’s like TMZ buying Digg. How well do you think that would go over?

TV Guide acquired a fantastic product that had a ton of potential. Why they didn’t pursue capitalizing on this is beyond me. There are many large conglomerate media companies out there that own smaller (indie?), niche subsidiaries to diversify their assets. Like Paramount Vantage, for instance. Their entire existence is to give an art house feel to movies produced and distributed by Paramount Pictures.

It seems TVGuide.com insisted on shutting the door on this community to push its own agenda. I can understand that philosophy if they acquired a property similar to what they are using tvguide.com/jumptheshark for now. But they didn’t. They took a subculture and just changed it significantly, without warning or informing the community.

To add more insult to injury, they went about titling some of their columns “shark bites” and “dancing with the sharks”. Not cool. Shame on them.

If you wanted to host the community on tvguide.com/jumptheshark that is fine. I get it. You own it. You want the bragging rights. Yeah yeah yeah. But don’t shut the door on a community that started in 1997, survived the dot com bust and brought in 70 thousand unique visitors a month, just because it did not match your primary audience.

It truly saddens me that one of my favorite websites of all time, jumptheshark.com officially jumped the shark.

I don’t know why, but each time I watch this I can’t stop laughing.

Seconds after the earth started rattling in California Tuesday morning, Twitter user @thevixy tweeted, “earthquake”. This was the first public notice of the tremor. Within minutes, thousands of users were updating their Twitter status to inform others of their experience and condition. It wasn’t until 4 ½ minutes after the quake when the NBC affiliate in San Diego finally reported the seism.

This is not the first time Twitter has been useful during times of disaster. Twitter was set ablaze during California’s October wildfires. Is tweeting the latest (and perhaps, greatest) form of citizen journalism?

Real-time updates and genuine reactions are qualities big media outlets struggle to provide.