
Twitter. Who Do You Think You Are? - anu_gupta
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/09/style/twitter-who-do-you-think-you-are.html
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dasil003
Something inside me is deeply saddened by the fact that a 300M user social
network that is novel enough to be undefinable is under constant attack from
journalists and Wall Street to continue growing and to articulate clearly what
it is.

Frankly, Twitter is something much more interesting than Facebook, and
something which could be even more interesting if it went back to its roots
and embraced the role of infrastructure and being many things to many people.

The problem is that anything less than being the biggest, most homogenized
social network is now considered failure. The invention of the @-reply, the
hashtag, and the first really viable way for celebrities to connect directly
to their fanbase is worth nothing, it's just water under the bridge. Silicon
Valley used to have a strong streak about creation of novel things for their
own sake, but now it's dominated by the mass market thinking that is behind
100 years of sterilization of our first-world existence.

Frankly, I couldn't possibly care less what media click-whores, and Wall
Street thieves think about anything.

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ewzimm
The kind of paternalistic thinking in this article is wrong on so many levels.
Basically it comes down to complaining about a "lack of leadership," meaning
that Twitter should be doing more to tell people how to use it instead of
letting them decide for themselves. I will never understand this idea that
everything needs to be dumbed-down and spoon-fed to customers to be any good.
There's even an extremely clear definition of what Twitter is laid out in the
article and criticized. It allows a person to communicate with many people in
real time regardless of what device they're using. That couldn't be clearer,
and it's dismissed as nonsensical.

The world does not need more programs and platforms that tell people exactly
how to use them. It needs tools to inspire creativity! This "Black Mirror"
video-exercise-bike-cult thinking will never get us anywhere good. If
anything, Twitter needs to open up its API again and welcome the third-party
developers back.

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dajohnson89
>It’s utterly insane that you still need to put a period before a person’s
Twitter handle, such as “.@twitter,” if you want everyone to see it.

Gee, I dunno. Maybe if someone wants to use the '@' character without it being
parsed as a handle.

>Marjorie Scardino, the former chief of the publishing firm Pearson, and
another board member, has tweeted only eight times, ever. That’s like having
someone on the board of Starbucks who doesn’t drink coffee.

What utter bollocks. What next, should the CEO of Lockheed Martin fly every
fighter jet his company manufactures?

This entire article is an inane smear.

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austenallred
The reality: Twitter doesn't even know, and Twitter has frequent internal
struggles to decide that.

So mostly it's an empty text box and people use it how they want.

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zghst
I didn't use my twitter for the first few years I had it but if you actually
start using it, it seems to be at the center of everything! It's an amazing
social network that makes everyone a part of the conversation, although its
lack of direction is very apparent. However that's all Twitter is, the
conversation, and it goes anywhere really.

