With Twitter turning 10 years old today I convinced a bunch of my PNConnect colleagues to share some brief thoughts on what the status network has meant to them – or other random thoughts about it – over the last decade. Here’s my contribution:
What Does Twitter Mean to You? More than anything Twitter has remained for me less what you’d call a “social network” and more what it was originally billed as: A microblogging network. Sure, it’s about following people and seeing what they have to say and then responding to, engaging with or acknowledging that. But it’s primarily a publishing platform that allows for self-expression, just in a different form factor than the blogs we were all using back in 2006. So if we wanted to say something long-winded we pulled up Blogger or MovableType but if we just wanted to dash off a sentence or two we now had the option to use Twitter, where we could just empty our heads of the smaller thoughts that occurred to us.
I of course had more to say so here’s the entirety of what I wrote, keeping in mind my full thoughts about Twitter’s impact could fill half a book:
Countless people are marking the occasion with essays and hot takes about what the network has meant to them, how it’s evolved over the last decade, what it still needs to do and what troubles it continues to face and so on. But let’s address one thing very clearly at the outset: People are still talking about Twitter every day.
At the outset there was of course the slightly (OK, more than slightly) snooty attitude that no one needed to know all the short, random thoughts that weren’t substantive enough for a blog post. The high-minded jokes about how we were all so narcissistic we thought what we had for lunch was so interesting it just had to be shared flowed plentifully. It was a rudimentary tool without many of the features we take for granted today like Retweets, @ mentions, photos and more. But it’s grown as our sophistication with using status networks has grown.
More than anything Twitter has remained for me less what you’d call a “social network” and more what it was originally billed as: A microblogging network. Sure, it’s about following people and seeing what they have to say and then responding to, engaging with or acknowledging that. But it’s primarily a publishing platform that allows for self-expression, just in a different form factor than the blogs we were all using back in 2006. So if we wanted to say something long-winded we pulled up Blogger or MovableType but if we just wanted to dash off a sentence or two we now had the option to use Twitter, where we could just empty our heads of the smaller thoughts that occurred to us.
That’s what Twitter has meant to me in the nine years since I joined Twitter, just shy of a year after it launched: An outlet for small thoughts. Sure, it’s a place to promote what I’m working on and what I’ve written and such, but that’s always meant less to me than the posts that are just me letting the voices in my head out to play for a bit.
My blog is, or at least has evolved to become, a more serious outlet. I’ve never really used Facebook for personal reasons and I try to keep LinkedIn very on-topic. But while I know I should be more on-point when it comes to Twitter it always turns back into the one-liners that made me giggle when I thought of them and which I subsequently feel the need to share. Is the world any richer for this? No, but the same can be said of 99% of what I and everyone else share there, on our blogs or anywhere else. So it’s just about pure self-expression.
One thing Twitter has never been to me is a news gathering tool. Back around 2008/2009, when Twitter was really taking off, there was a wave of people saying they were ditching RSS because they got all their news on Twitter or Facebook. That seemed to me a clear sign they didn’t know how to use either RSS or Twitter effectively because the latter is a “blink and you’ll miss it” platform while the other is “the news will be here waiting for you” technology. Look away from it for five minutes and you’ve missed a lot.
Happy birthday Twitter. While I may not love every change you’ve made in the last decade or so, you’ve also been an indispensable tool, connecting me with meaningful and important people. More than anything, I hope you, and the people using you, stay weird.
Chris Thilk 