Recently, I’ve come to a realization. Twitter wants me to answer the question, “What are you doing?” with my updates! I completely forgot! Twitter was originally based on the idea of status updates? Who knew!
All right, I’m being facetious. I only partially forgot about the “What are you doing?” question. But can you blame me? Very few tweets directly answer that question anymore. If my Twitter stream were the blue screens in Jeopardy and I had to guess what question the tweets were answering, I’d probably shrug, “What’s up?”
Bottom line: Twitter has evolved away from its original concept. The real value of it lies in the fact that it has become a place to share and spread ideas in an interactive manner. In an interview last year, Twitter founder Biz Stone said this about Twitter’s interaction model:
But Twitter users don’t need that “little push” anymore. They’re tweeting just fine on their own. Here’s a random shot of my Twitter feed. Notice that only one out of six tweets addresses Twitter’s inquiry:
Facebook acknowledged this shift in demand from sharing statuses to sharing thoughts. The new question “What’s on your mind?” is much closer to the way people are using status updates and Tweets.
So to wrap it up, I’ll tackle the video from Asylum at the top of this post. No, I don’t think it was created by someone who doesn’t use Twitter. Although it does reflect the impression many non-Twitter users have of Twitter. The video is one of many parodies on Twitter’s concept.
