Bryan Smith argues that Twitter’s success should be based on its ability to revolutionise communication and not its commercial viability
There’s an old saying that one should die for one’s art rather than one’s profits. With the news that key executives have left Twitter and with the company’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, scrambling to calm investor panic, it would seem a prudent point in time to examine Twitter’s success.
As a company, Twitter is quickly becoming a failure. With the social media platform even resorting to potentially dropping its trademark 140 character limit in favour of a 10,000 character one, it would seem the social network has lost the genesis of what made it great in the first place.
Read: Rumours: Could Twitter expand to a 10,000 character limit?
Twitter was never meant to be one of the world’s biggest businesses, generating millions in ad revenue with a booming user base. While, admittedly, that would have been a helpful milestone along the way, Twitter’s success – and significance – is rooted in a much more significant step. Twitter effectively led the online revolution in not only news, but in the way we share and distribute information.
This might sound a contrived thought, but lets examine its significance for a brief moment.
At the start of my undergraduate years studying journalism, I was often tasking with writing quick-fire newspaper headlines, as many journalism students start off doing before progressing into article structure, interview techniques and long form writing. By the end of my degree, I wasn’t so much writing newspaper headlines as I was crafting concise 140 character messages.
“There’s an old saying that one should rather die for one’s art rather than one’s profits.”
The emphasis of news changed, in the space of years, from elaborate, long-form analysis into quick fire relay messages. I was fortunate enough to ride one wave of this change; I imagine journalism students who studied around the time of the television news boom in the 70s to have rode the first.
News is all around us, and Twitter was – and is – the lead instigator in not only bringing breaking stories into our living rooms, but also our lives. There’s a compelling reason millions of human beings attend their favourite sports fixture and spend more than half of it sharing updates on their smartphone as if there was no official commentator around for miles.
To return to our point, there are crucible moments in history, and the emergence of Twitter as a service where life – and not only news is shared – is destined to be one of them. The sad ending of this tale might end with the platform itself going under, as Twitter heaves under the pressure to be a commercial success. What the platform wasn’t born to be, it might die trying to become.
It’s still early days for the advent of online space and its role in the story of humankind, and our error in judging Twitter’s success is to liken it to the commercial viability of platforms such as Facebook. Twitter’s power isn’t necessarily defined by its emergence as a platform, but rather as a service.
“A failure to understand the exact makeup of the service has left Twitter floating in the breeze, and, in the worst case, bereft of a future.”
Let’s not forget, Twitter wasn’t started with the ambition of becoming a phenomenon, much as Zuckerberg and co found themselves chasing with the early days of Facebook. Twitter was started as a means to more easily share and digest crucial information between networks, much as the famous Allied World War II poster quipped – “the enemy is listening, be brief.”
In the years that has followed since, Twitter has largely muddled trying to understand its own unique nature by unashamedly chasing the success of other social media sites. Ads, endorsements and more have diluted the strength of the platform from one that had – and still has – the potential to become a pillar of 21st century communication into a failed corporate model.
Then again, its all too easy to surrender to this form of logic without suggesting an alternative. Human beings need food to eat, and as the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams, Noah Glass, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone likely surmised, Twitter became an excellent means to acquire all the food they’d need.
Twitter’s power isn’t necessarily defined by its emergence as a platform, but rather as a service.
In my view, Twitter should have expanded early into becoming a paid-for service through which corporations, news houses and other ventures could have paid and subscribed to easily stay in touch with millions of followers, who could use the service on a free tier. In this regard, had this strategy been effectively implemented early, Twitter’s success could indeed be measured by the flow of dollar bills.
Instead, a failure to understand the exact makeup of the service has left Twitter floating in the breeze, and, in the worst case, bereft of a future. Unless Twitter receives greater intervention from a helping hand, the service that fundamentally set the course for communication in the 21st century might be set in the same direction as the printing press.
Else, there’s still time to hire Snoop Dogg as CEO.
