There are those moments in the business cycle of a young dynamic brand when people look back and say: "If only that hadn't happened." And so it is with Twitter. And so it is with Miley Cyrus.
You see Miley, she who is sometimes Hannah Montana, was rapidly becoming one of Twitter's most trusted Swiss Guards. She had almost 2 million followers.
Now the sheep have lost their shepherdess. For Miley Cyrus has silenced her tweets, starved her Twitter feed, and drifted off into the uncertain socially not-working darkness from which some stars never return.
This is clearly a disaster for Twitter. Microblogging needs micro people to bring in the macro crowds. Cyrus, who is possibly only four or five years old in real life, was one of Twitter's most durable pre-pubescent predilections.
After her painful and dramatic departure, how can coming generations take the brand seriously?
Perhaps worse, though, is the means Cyrus chose to deliver her beating on tweeting. Yes, she went on YouTube. And, yes, she performed a "Good-Bye, Twitter" rap.
In the rap, she dismisses the idea that she was forced to quit Twitter by her boyfriend, Liam Hemsworth, an Australian actor perhaps most famous for his role as, well, Miley Cyrus's boyfriend.
If my ears served me correctly, Cyrus seems to suggest in this musical tour-de-farce that she was concerned that she had begun to "tweet her pimples."
I was not aware that she had pimples, nor that she had attempted to tweet them. But I am concerned that she may have tried to do this without the appropriate medical supervision.
However, before my cup of concern overflowed into my glass of cabernet, I could hear the world's next Streisand rap that no one really cares if she's "playing with Noah" or "doing my hair."
I am not sure who Noah might be, but the underlying arc of pain seems to have been caused by those horrid gossipy tabloids trawling through her tweets, like investigative journalists digging into Elton John's garbage cans, in search of juicy information.
In a disturbingly out-of-sync climax, Cyrus declares she wants "her private life private" and that is done "trying to please."
It is a confessional that will surely make so many of the world's parents weep. Indeed, Cyrus admits that she became a little obsessed with Katy Perry and Britney, but that she is now "peacin' out."
As I peace together this seminal moment in social-networking history, I find myself saddened beyond measure that one of the world's great Twitterers may have been forever lost.
Nonethless, I know that you, together with the Twitter hierarchy, will cling on to the fact that one of the world's other great rappers, Kevin Federline, appears to still have a Twitter account
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