We may have to invent a new term for the Web 2.0 era – something like “Facebook-funk,” or “Twitter-algia.”

Steven Levy has a comical essay in the new issue of Wired about his pangs of guilt about his lack of prompt updates to social media. Not having posted new photos to Facebook, or Dugg anything, or blasted out regular Twitter messages (“tweets”) lately, he says, “I worry that I'm snatching morsels from the information food bank without making any donations.” After a couple of thousand complete strangers signed up to receive his tweets, Levy adds, “I feel guilty when not serving this hungry crowd – remorseful when I am.”

In the new issue of New York Magazine, meanwhile, Will Leitch profiles the founders of Twitter, which recently received an astounding valuation of $250 million from a new round of investors, according to TechCrunch. A veteran of the dot-com bubble days (like me), Leitch is quick to note that the pronouncements of the Twitter co-creators sound a lot like those of hundreds of failed world-changing Web companies, ca. 1998-2000.

The micro-blogging service is “another step toward the democratization of information,” claims co-founder Evan Williams. Biz Stone is even more grandiose: “Twitter is not about the triumph of technology. It’s about the triumph of the human spirit.”

Spare me. Twitter – which, in case you don’t know, allows users to broadcast brief (150 characters or less) messages from any device to a Web-based service that can be accessed on PCs, laptops, smartphones, etc. – is a way for overconnected, over-caffeinated Web junkies to convince themselves that their moment-by-moment doings are significant.

It’s also not making money, of course, and according to Leitch and other observers it’s not about to start doing so anytime soon.

“We have a product, and we’re working on it,” Williams tells Leitch, in a pitch-perfect parody of the airily confident pronouncements of Web entrepreneurs a decade ago. “The money will come.”

Okay, the money will come if Twitter keeps growing. Right now it has about 6 million users – that’s about $40 per user, according to the latest company valuation, if TechCrunch is to be believed. An analysis by Hitwise analyst Heather Dougherty indicates that the service is, indeed, continuing to grow rapidly – it recently surpassed Digg in terms of pure Web traffic, Dougherty reported last week.

If you dig into those numbers a bit, though, they are slightly less impressive. “Twitter receives a higher share of traffic from social networks, which is mostly due to the applications which integrate the services,” Dougherty comments. Translation: Twitter is catching on mainly with people who already use social media, like Facebook, heavily. It’s not going mainstream. What’s more, even on Facebook, “over 104,000 active users” use the Twitter application that links Facebook status updates to Twitter tweets.

That’s about .2 percent of Facebook’s U.S. user base of 45 million. Not exactly a breakout phenomenon.

What’s more, there’s growing evidence that even blogging, which is to tweeting as Dostoevsky is to a Post-It note, has reached its crest. In a story on WebProNews today, Jason Lee Miller reports that many well-known bloggers are abandoning the form because of the time involved, the legions of crackpots out there eager to vilify bloggers, and the low, not to say non-existent, return on investment.

“Those heralded A-listers we all looked to over the past few years? Many of them are hanging it up,” comments Miller. The defectors include Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, who walked away in a huff after, he says, a stranger spat in his face at a tech conference.

Flying spittle aside, there’s surely a place in the rapidly evolving media universe for thoughtful and provocative blogs – like, say, this one. Twitter? Don’t bet on it. For one thing, while the technorati may be convinced that Twitter matters, regular people out there in the real world could care less. In part I base this on an unscientific survey of my college-age nieces and nephews and their friends, who are absolutely Twitter’s target audience – habitual text-messagers who would no more leave the house without their iPhones than they would naked. When I asked about a dozen of them recently what they thought about Twitter, all I got was blank stares. Not one of them had ever heard of it. (Needless to say that also goes for my contemporaries who don’t happen to be tech journalists and analysts.)

Of course I could be wrong. You can let me know in a tweet. But then, I’ll never see it.