A look at the real value of Twitter
Only problem with social media darling: It’s not social media
There may not be much wrong with Twitter other than its valuation — $19 billion and dropping.
Twitter sold itself to the market as a broad and captivating social media platform, which, regardless of its earnings, implies one value. Its actual function is much more eccentric, novel and of quite uncertain value.
The company announced last week a big cut in its workforce. This followed the recent reappointment of one of its founders, Jack Dorsey, as the new permanent CEO. Dorsey is the CEO of Square, a company in the process of a public offering, which generally takes more than a CEO’s fulltime attention. Still, the problems at Twitter — its failure to maintain the magic of social media — seemed to demand a return, represented by Dorsey, to when it had potential.
Twitter’s several years as a social media darling was as happenstance a development as the seeming happenstance development of it falling out of social media grace. Co-founder Ev Williams, who as Twitter’s formative CEO perhaps has had the most influence on the company and who remains a dominant shareholder, was less social media savant than publishing hobbyist. Dorsey’s early interest was in messaging software. The third
founder, Biz Stone, is a Silicon Valley gadfly and writer of books about blogging.
Williams knew little about the publishing industry, and perhaps precisely because he was an outsider to the industry, his interest was to make it easier for individuals to publish. Before Twitter, Williams created a tool that became Blogger. After a rift at Twitter, foreshadowing its current disarray, Williams started Medium, which hopes to somehow both democratize publishing and create a digital descendant of the general interest magazine — rather more old media than new.
Twitter, too, was a publishing tool, albeit without clear usefulness. Still, its telegraphic style bore some resemblance to, well, the telegraph, which itself once revolutionized the news industry. Twitter put a public telegraph in everybody’s hands — or in any- one’s hands who wanted a public telegraph.
This was a similar but qualitatively different function from Facebook and other social platforms. Twitter was not about communicating with your friends or community. It was a broadcast function. It attracted people who had an ambition to speak to the wider world.
It was a medium suited to sociopaths, self-promoters and journalists.
Indeed, Twitter’s breakthrough moments happened during combustible world events: Witnesses and participants could tell their own story. It was a small revolution in news.
News professionals assumed it was a revolution earthshaking to everyone. This was less than true. The function of speaking to the wider world, of broadcasting your thoughts to everyone, turns out not to be of much interest to most people — in part because most times, the wider world doesn’t pay attention to them. That lack of attention perhaps accounts for the service’s growth plateau. At the same time, there is the opposite problem: Expressing thoughts can be dangerous for an amateur. Twitter waits for the unschooled to misspeak, then it mugs them. Another reason for the public’s growing reluctance to join the fun.
Journalists came to think it was the real thing — real news, fast and unfiltered. But the real action for the news business was happening on Facebook, where organizations such as Buzzfeed were not just promoting themselves but pioneering, for better or worse, a new form of journalism for the social media world. Still, through Twitter, journalists and news organizations — the most reputable ones among them — found they could efficiently communicate with other journalists, creating a loop of promotion and attention, which could suggest the wider world was listening.
Twitter itself seemed confused about its role. Perhaps because so many media people said it was so important and because celebrities used it to get the attention of media people, it thought it was succeeding in social media instead of just among media pros. As an open platform, it was more and more a closed loop.
It seemed to briefly grasp at the idea of being a big foot news platform, even hiring a news czar, Vivian Schiller, a well-known news executive, to use its platform leverage to do deals with news companies, rather hoping, it seemed, to become a Spotify of news. From a business view, the problem with that is even if you control the news, it’s still just news, of declining interest to advertisers who need to support it. Schiller’s tenure was brief.
The new initiative, a rather panicky one, is to try to turn news back to a social media experience; in social media parlance, to prompt the conversation. This is a new feature called Moments. These are curated tweets, a collection of mostly saccharine observations by celebrities and other ho-hum conventional wisdom on timely topics, meant to create a safe harbor for passive viewers and perhaps to discourage the sociopaths and muggers.