What Exactly Is Twitter?
It’s a funny enough question to be asking seeing as Twitter has been around well over 4 years now but I was prompted to write this post after this article where twitter’s own CEO admitted recently that he had to do some work figuring out what Twitter was and how it would be defined. He said:
“I am working on clarity around that at the moment. I am currently trying to define what Twitter’s purpose is in the long term. We will be able to be more specific on that answer in the near future.”
After pondering it for a couple of months the best he could do was…
We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them
This is an improvement on where he was but still doesn’t really nail it on the head for me. I think they need to clarify it further.
Think of the other big online companies… Think of Google you think search. Think of Facebook I think friends. Paypal are payments. Amazon are books. Skype are calls. It’d hard to define what you do in one or two words but the big successful online businesses have done it either on purpose or just naturally over time. Twitter on the other hand is many things to many people and sometimes trying to be everything doesn’t work which is precisely why their CEO is so keen on defining what they are and focusing all their attention on improving it.
Is Twitter a real time search engine? Is it something that people use socially? Is it a news wire? A way of keeping up with your friends? A customer service tool? The truth is it can be used for all of those things. Everybody uses it differently.
So what exactly is Twitter? I’d be surprised if you can nail it in one or two words!
