Because bigger isn't better.
When Twitter first launched, a tweet was just text, one hundred and forty characters of it. Fewer than a text message. Twttr was so addicted to brevity, it didn't even have vowels. It's a far cry from the Twitter that's slowly been revealing itself over the last year or two — the Twitter that's not simply a technology platform but a media company that wants to become an empire.
Twitter was always defined by what it wasn't — its trademark feature, the 140-character limit, became not simply the ethos of the service, but culture as a whole, a constant process of distillation down to the tiniest atomic units of thought and speech. A tweet became the new soundbite. This sentence is exactly the length of a tweet — 140 characters — and all the substance that one tweet could contain, not all that long ago. Today, on the other hand, a tweet can be a video, an Amazon listing — and they're all hunks of media packed onto a never-ending conveyor belt. The crisp, bracing stream of words that was Twitter is now a sludgy river of content.
Is that still Twitter?
In the beginning, what Twitter was — the vision — was driven primarily by its users, which is totally different scenario than today. The service launched in July 2006; while the company added favorites and direct messages and timestamps within the first few months, in the same timeframe users created much of the syntax that has come to define Twitter. The @reply organically emerged from users, before officially being codified in May 2007; hashtags showed up a year after Twitter launched, in summer of 2007. Again, created by users. So were retweets, which have a strange little history, briefly chronicled by Favstar.fm founder Tim Haines. Twitter developers were a close second to users — the team behind Twitterific, the first Twitter app, coined the word "tweet," along with using a bird icon to represent Twitter. Taken together, these things were the core of Twitter — the text-based Twitter. It was a little complicated, a little jargon-y, but ultimately a simple and constrained service totally oriented around its users and developers. This was the Twitter users and developers loved.
No comments:
Post a Comment