Titles appear to have quietly died again.

They used to be alive: In email subject and body form, in newspaper articles, books and academic papers. The first popular forms of independent, online writing imitated these, basing themselves on the opinion columns of print.

The earliest blogs (such as that of Ev Williams, circa 1998 briefly did away with headings for entries, and instead became title-less streams of paragraph updates. But, when b2, Movable Type, and later WordPress popularised blogging further, titles had returned as an accepted part of the norm.

Everything of that generation separated titles: Flickr had both a title and description for photographs. Delicious had a title and description for links. Upcoming had a title and description for events. RSS—and therefore Atom—had titles separate from body.

One exception for all time was SMS, and maybe that’s important as our generation has come of age and dominates the demographic of the social web, because everything new that today appears to rebel against titles: Tumblr came amongst the first; text entries like this one mark the title field as ‘optional’. Twitter is the most significant, each entry just a little snippet of text. If things had gone differently, Twitter might have ended up as a real microblogging service; a one-paragraph-per-entry blogging tool in the guise of Ev’s old blog, rather than the realtime network it is now.

Instagram? No separation of title and description. Path? No titles, and the descriptions themselves are built structurally from metadata.

Perhaps it’s just a trait of apps simplifying and requiring less of users to create content, especially desirable on portable devices where if not restricted by cramped input, people are restricted by time. Alternatively, it’s a necessary pattern for streaming content, since the frequency of regular updates need to be skimmed and a formal title interrupts that flow. Either way, I don’t think mandatory titles will come back this time.