Twitter at 10: It’s not about you

When I was in high school I discovered that a well-timed quip or joke in the classroom could make an entire class – even the teacher – laugh or at least react. It was a kind of skill, the ability to think on my feet and the distance from my brain to my mouth being maybe a millisecond shorter than those around me.

It would be 25 years before I connected this relatively minor skill with the perfect digital platform: Twitter.

Twitter and I didn’t see eye-to-eye in the early going. I honestly did not even hear about it until almost a year after Jack Dorsey’s famous first tweet. In my defense much of the world was unaware of Twitter until it made its big splash at South by Southwest Interactive in March 2007. That year, it won the Web award. At that time, Twitter didn’t even have a proper mobile app, so news that it won was delivered to everyone via Twitter SMS notifications.

As a long-time member of the tech media, I was always on the look-out for the hot new thing. I can’t tell you how many virtual social platforms I signed up for in the mid-90’s and how many social platforms I tried in the early oughts (yes, I was on Friendster) before I found Twitter.

If you’ve read my old columns, you know that not only did I not get Twitter. I even predicted its early demise.

Never so wrong

Within two years of joining, though, my own occasional absences from the social media platform (once known as a micro-blogging platform) have led co-workers to question my health and safety. One 48-hour stretch during a trade show had friends convinced I had died.

My relationship with Twitter is best summarized as the kind you have with a sibling. I love it, deeply, but also question its choices. I can be vocal in both my admiration and my dissatisfaction. Yet, at the end of the day, we’re tied together.

I am, obviously, on a wide variety of other social platforms: Vine (a creative’s delight), Facebook (“hi, mom!”), Instagram (so many pretty pictures…of food), Vibr (the new “thing”), Snapchat (my daughter wonders why I bother), but I have the biggest following and highest-level of engagement on Twitter and, as I long ago discovered, it is tailor-made for that long-ago discovered skill: snappy, instant reactions and insights that come from somewhere in either my subconscious or truest self.

Facebook is a great place for me to react to to what I see on Facebook, but even with a verified account, its reach is limited for me. I cannot remember a single thing I’ve posted on Facebook that’s gone viral (at least my level of viral). Facebook tells me I have over 100,000 followers, but not even a tiny fraction of them engage with many of my public posts. Part of this is my fault. I’m a lazy Facebook user who uses Twitter to auto-place 80% (or more) of my Facebook posts. Even so, I see Facebook as the inverse of Twitter. It’s private while Twitter is, by default, public.

I want my best thoughts to be public.

And because Twitter is a gloriously public platform, I’ve also made connections and friendships on Twitter that would never have been possible IRL (I’m looking at you, William Shatner). Twitter slams together the ordinatry (me!) with those who have had and are leading extraordinary lives. It’s something almost unique to Twitter and, I think, why so many on Twitter lurk instead of engage. They can RT and like a Tweet from Alyssa Milano and, feel a little bit connected to them. Some can screw up the courage to tweet directly to their Twitter heroes and, sometimes, get a direct response. I know that’s what I did, over and over again.

Into the woods

As Twitter has gone through what I now like to call its dark period, I have openly questioned what happens to me if Twitter ceases to exist (yes, it’s all about me). It is the platform where I shine and I am not alone. There are 320 million (plus or minus 10 million) people who are a lot like me.

As others have smartly noted, Twitter thrives not on everyday people (like Facebook) but on media, celebrity, marketers and brands. This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, I noticed from my earliest days on Twitter how many of the people I followed and were building the biggest followings were either marketing types or self-anointed social media experts. I learned most of my own Twitter skills by watching them.

If you’ve ever wondered why Twitter stopped growing, look no further than its core audience. I honestly believe it simply ran out of those types of people. Facebook is for everyone. Twitter is for people who have a message to deliver. That can be news, advice, tips, information or brand messaging. Twitter is an amazing platform for all of that. It’s kind of a terrible one for conversation.

I and many others have engaged in Twitter conversations, but, let’s be honest, having a conversation 140 characters at a time is not really a conversation at all. It’s a yelling match and if no one is yelling, it’s an interlaced series of carefully-worded (and sometimes not-so-carefully) statements. Watching a Twitter conversation unfold is akin to watching a very orderly debate (no, not like the Republican ones). Cross-talk on Twitter is literally impossible. Kanye is excellent Twitter ranter, but on Twitter he could never interrupt Taylor Swift the way he did at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.

Over the years, Twitter has tried to alter its timeline to accommodate these conversations. The sort of threading doesn’t really work.

Twitter excels at commentary. Live tweets of TV shows like the Oscars and Super Bowl are the equivalent of millions of people sitting in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 audience making snarky comments about what they see on screen. And I love it.

As Twitter celebrates 10 years in existence, and I mark 9 years of almost ceaseless tweeting, I hope Twitter, and everyone else can learn to accept what Twitter is and is not. That may require a sale to a company (maybe Google) that can remove all the stockholder pressure and, if so, I’m on board with that.

I’ll accept almost anything short of Twitter disappearing, because, as I said, where does that leave me?

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