Twitter May Not “Get” Twitter: Tentative Thoughts on Emerging Media #1
I’ve heard the phrase so-and-so doesn’t “get” social media a lot lately. Perhaps because I was mumbling it to myself. The phrase assumes that some people do “get” media. Do they? Social media strikes me as nothing if not inchoate, protean and several other words I liked to throw around in college without quite knowing what they meant.
1. Tim Otis of Axiom has pointed out that the basic twitter prompt “What Are You Doing?” doesn’t describe how users actually use Twitter.
If you want to know what I’m doing, look at my facebook status update. The looser connections I have on twitter seem more interested in what I’m thinking, what I’ve read, what I’ve used to good effect. Tim suggested “What Are You Endorsing?” and that gets closer to the essence of the beast.
2. Twitter the company has somehow managed to lag behind Twitter the phenomenon.
Adobe has developed a better interface in tweetdeck, but it’s a desktop program so it takes forever to load, at least on my computer. Twitter has not incorporated tiny url, easy retweeting, twipics, typo correction (see below), interest tags in profiles, or any deft mechanism for isolating replies and threading conversations.
3. Twitter worships the Great Digital Incontinence which is modern life—people yammering pointlessly on cell phones while they block the produce aisle.
Twitter could be on the side of brevity—of the haiku, the aphorism, the clutter-busting headline.
But instead they take it a point of pride that they won’t allow you to correct typos.
You can’t tell brands “trust your brand to us” and then say typos don’t matter. To correct them now, you need to implement the following bit of inelegance: copy the tweet, discard the tweet, paste the tweet back into twitter, correct the typo, and then republish.
4. Twitter also seems stuck in a celebrity paradigm rather than a conversation paradigm.
I admire Stephen Frye. I don’t care what he had for breakfast. But twitter seems built for a few stars to relentlessly micro-cast their lives to a vast number of followers. I am simply not interested in that and I don’t think I’m alone. I’m interested in having a conversation with people who are more or less my peers. Yet popular users who try to implement this model and actually converse with people wind up getting frustrated.
5. Open Source evidently means never having to say you’re sorry.
Open Source can be great. WordPress incorporates its developers’ best ideas into a better interface and more options. Twitter is perilously close to being Lazy Source.
