Nick Carr, On Twitter

I read this old article on Twitter by Nicholas Carr only recently (he wrote it when Twitter was just starting to catch on) but it was still fun to read. I loved his description what Twitter does:

“Twitter unbundles the blog, fragments the fragment. It broadcasts the text message, turns SMS into a mass medium.”

The difference from the telegraph is illuminating:

“The telegraph required you to stop and ask yourself: Is this worth it? Twitter says: Everything’s worth it!”

Nothing seems to have changed between now and then it comes to what people tweet:

“And what exactly are we broadcasting? The minutiae of our lives.”

Or to put it more colourfully:

“Twitter is the telegraph of Narcissus. Not only are you the star of the show, but everything that happens to you, no matter how trifling, is a headline, a media event, a stop-the-presses bulletin.”

Reduced to tweet size, that would be:

“Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking?”

And once Twitter got critical mass, it became mandatory to get on it. To “prove” that you exist. Or as Scott Karp said:

“I Twitter, therefore I am.”

(today, of course, the verb form is “tweet”, but hey, this was said years back).

More recently, I saw another blog by Carr on how Twitter has evolved. Today, we have inline tweets. Like in the pic below, see that red text with the floating button above it?

Click on it and bingo! It shows up as your tweet (assuming you are logged into Twitter)! Tongue in cheek, Carr lauds this great time saving innovation:

“The arrival of the inline tweet — the readymade tweetable nugget, prepackaged, highlighted, and activated with a single click — is such a cause for celebration.”

And as a bonus:

“I think the best thing about the inline tweet is that you no longer have to read, or even pretend to read, what you tweet before you tweet it… Welcome to linking without thinking!”

In his next blog, Carr describes the problem that inline tweets would create:

“Who wants to get caught tweeting the same lousy tweet that everyone else is tweeting? It’s tacky.”

Carr proposes the solution to this:

“Here’s how I imagine it working: a publication captures personal data on its readers’ habits and literary/intellectual/political sensibilities (or procures said data from Facebook or maybe Twitter itself), and then, using some kind of simple text-parsing algorithm, it personalizes the inline tweets that are offered to each reader. When a reader alights on an article, he or she gets his or her own custom-tailored tweetables.”

Whatever next?!