So, farewell then, Dick Costolo. And your sidekick, the straight man, Bud Abbott. It appears you were unable to make any money from Twitter and – I suppose unsurprisingly – those who had valued it at more than the total GDP of South America are getting a bit nervous about their returns.

In many respects, Twitter is like Greece – I can’t understand a word that the natives say and the wine can be a bit ropey – but it doesn’t have thousands of years of culture behind it and I don’t believe (although I could be wrong) that the Twitter Marbles are gathering dust in the British Museum. No, of course that’s not what I meant.

Twitter is like Greece – actually, social media are like Greece, but I’ll stick with Twitter, because it’s at the heart of the gag – because it started out as an attractive place to be, favoured by the few, seen as culturally significant, and a place apart. Then there were questions over the integrity of its economy and many feared that it was a mahoosive financial house of cards, ready to come tumbling down taking Spain and Portugal (Facebook and Instagram) with it in a chaos of dusty wreckage.

And then, and then, a corner was turned and it seemed that the country was out of the woods – the economic model worked, there was a new tieless Yanis Varoufakis on the block and, while not to everyone’s liking, while many thought it unsustainable, it appeared that our Greek metaphor had turned the corner.

Inevitably, of course, the naysayers – some might call them ‘the realists’ – were right and once again, Greece is headed down the toilet. Grexit beckons. Winding up the metaphor, are we seeing the beginning of the Twexit? Which sounds like something that popstrel strumpette Miley Cyrus might be seen doing at an awards ceremony. Or indeed, if social as a whole is the new Greece, a Sexit? Which again sounds like something that etc etc etc.

What I’m getting at – and of course, you’re way ahead of me at this point, gentle readers – is whether the inability of Twitter to generate profit, or grow its key metrics, is the straw that is going to break the social camel’s back and prompt a re- evaluation of the potential (and potential worth) of the new dot-com boom? I note that Etsy’s April IPO has been deemed, in June, the worst performing IPO of 2015. Quite the accolade. Pundits point at Twitter and say that the lesson is that you don’t go public unless you’re wildly profitable, which it wasn’t and isn’t. Even if it had been, a valuation in 2013 of $14.2bn seems, to use a well-recognised PE term, a bit ‘toppy.’ Pundits also say it isn’t mainstream enough, like Snapchat or Instagram. (Personally I thought it was very mainstream, but there’s a point right there. What do we laypeople know?) Fortune.com said, “It’s beginning to feel like Twitter is doomed to live forever as company that can’t fulfil its potential.”

So Elvis Costolo resigns. You all probably knew that he was a stand-up comedian before he became chief executive of Twitter (I didn’t – everyday’s a school day) and Twitter’s share price went up 4% on the news. (On the news he’d resigned, not the news that he was a joker, obviously.) Which rather implies a school of thought which says that all Twitter needs to fulfil its potential is new leadership – when the truth is that it has lost its ability to grow users, never mind not finding its ability to monetise them.

So, is this it? Has the emperor finally pushed his luck in the invisible raiment department? Will the thing that finally does for social as a business proposition not be a concern for privacy, or a lack of any regulation – but a simple inability to generate profit in proportion to price? Only time will tell.