Category — Twitter

I read recently that Twitter has finally changed their question at the top of the website to read “What’s happening ?” from the old one which said “What are you doing ?”

Here is the original post by @biz on Twitter’s blog

This change was of course covered by all major blogs including Techcrunch and Mashable among others.

It is interesting that Biz quotes the following reasons :
“People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, “What’s happening?” A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive. ”

I must be prophetic for I urged Twitter to make precisely this change and even suggested the same question as a better alternative tagline almost eight months back in  my Twitter updates and also posted a blog entry here

Maybe  @ev or @Biz were actually listening and decided to implement my suggestion ? Or maybe great minds think alike !

Link to The original Tweet, posted Mar 27, 2009 :
“Isn’t is time Twitter changed their tagline “What are you doing? ” to something that reflects what most tweets are about ?”

Here are my suggestions for alternative tag lines that Twitter could use :

Alternative Twitter Taglines

Note the alternative suggested above  ”What’s happening ?”   !

Well at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that I was ahead of the curve here  :) ?

By now thousands of articles and blog posts have analyzed the reasons  for the appeal of Twitter.  They have sliced and diced it neatly into its various components - simplicity, brevity, openness, immediacy,  transparency etc. But if you have ever tried to explain  Twitter this way to someone who has never used Twitter,  you most likely got blank stares.

In fact recently I tried to explain what Twitter is to a friend’s mother  - who is in her eighties and is not computer literate. So I tried to come up with an analogy that could convey the essence of   Twitter to her without using any technical jargon.  And this is what I came up with :

“Twitter is like a giant cocktail party where  everyone is talking (tweeeting) or listening.  You can wander around and mingle with anyone and overhear all the conversations in the room as a steady stream of chatter.  You can also  pick anyone you find interesting  and hear everything they say (or follow them).    You can talk  to any of them and you can grab anyone else’s attention by  just tapping  them on the shoulder with a gentle t@p - that is a tap with an @  (or a mention) !    And if you  hear something interesting you  can just turn around and RepeaT it to everyone who is listening to you -   which would be a RT or a  retweet.  And if  someone finds what you say  interesting they can do the same.    And of course,  almost everybody who is  anybody  is there at this party  -  from Ashton Kutcher to Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh -   leaders, politicians, CEOs, movie stars, journalists, atheletes,  colleagues, maybe even  your neighbor (and sometimes even their cat)  - and you can talk to any and all of them.   Plus it is a fun way to meet new people.  Which is why it is one of those parties no one wants to miss, and once you are there no one wants to leave.”

So how would you explain Twitter to your grandmother ?

Microsoft, Google sparring over Twitter? Should be interesting… http://bit.ly/9JbJb

The explosive growth of Twitter has evoked great interest among both Google and Microsoft to acquire the company. For Google this would immediately fill the gap in their search of real-time results and give them an even bigger share of the search market. For Microsoft, this would be a way to gain a desperately needed competitive edge for Bing.   While this would be a huge win for either company, it may not be the best thing for Twitter itself.  I think the  real potential  of Twitter is yet to be fully realized and if it merges into either giant - this may be jeopardized.