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Twitter, a 10-Year-Old Company, Is Still Explaining What Twitter Is (theverge.com)
Twitter investors have long expressed their concerns about the rate at which Twitter is growing. The social networking website has seen platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat born into existence and quickly overtake it in terms of user base and engagement level. One of the reasons why Twitter hasn't grown as rapidly is because of a confusion among many -- including what we can say, Twitter itself -- about what exactly is this platform for. The Verge reports: Twitter came into our lives in 2006, and after a decade of existence, most people still have no idea what Twitter even is. Ninety percent of respondents to a Twitter-organized questionnaire say they recognize the brand, but most "didn't know or simply misunderstood" what it was for. Most people also thought having an account meant they had to tweet every day. As Twitter said in a blog post about these findings: "We realized we had some explaining and clarifying to do!" Over the years, Twitter has changed the way it acknowledges itself before people. It was once known as a social networking website, but not long ago the company marketed itself as a "news" service. Vanity Fair adds: The campaign, which launches today, is all about what's happening -- what's trending, what games are going on, what news events are breaking, what are people talking about, live, right now. A video at the center of the campaign cycles through footage of Black Lives Matters protests, athletes competing in the Olympics and a woman playing Pokemon Go, Lin-Manuel Miranda on stage at Hamilton, and Donald Trump stumping at a campaign rally. "We see it as a focus and an emphasis on what Twitter has always been about," Leslie Berland, Twitter's chief marketing officer, told The Hive. "We can see what's happening as it's happening, with all the live commentary that makes Twitter so special."
#freemilo
I donno, they seem to have gotten the news-media hooked on it, they will repeat whatever any C-lister or above says on shows like Entertainment Tonight, and if it catches enough attention there then it ends up making the actual news.
From a publicity point of view it's golden, doesn't cost anything and can increase exposure.
Why people care is what I don't quite get, but I've never really entirely understood why some things become popular anyway.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I don't know *why* twitter is.
Twitter is a Mobile Social Network. But it's design was for 2006, not 2016, and this is the problem. Twitter was designed to be a communications platform before smart phones. The entire platform was designed around sending/receiving text messages, and having a simple, clean, and fast web based front-end for accessing these text messages. Connectivity has expanded. Device capability has expanded. Multimedia capabilities have expanded as well. But twitter is still living in the past, in the era of simple text messages.
Also, another killer to Twitter is their web front end is now the most bloated piece of shit on the face of the earth. If I leave a twitter tab open for any length of time (sometimes even just a few minutes), the background JavaScript processing is so horrendous, that the tab literally stops responding, and requires closing it and re-opening the tab (refreshing the page isn't enough to fix the issue). This entirely kills the idea of letting twitter stay open in the background in a pinned tab for casually checking updates.
Simply not true: I have some very fact-heavy exchanges with people who know what they are talking about, spiced with suitable links.
I find Twitter useful in the way that specialist parts of USENET used to be: people who know things sharing them concisely, without needing to have egos stroked.
I know that's not what everyone uses Twitter for, and the odd cat video *may* have snuck through my timeline, but...
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/