Twitter will be ten years old tomorrow, March 21st, 2016. Who sent the first tweet and what’s it? Jack Dorsey, co-founder and now CEO of Twitter. With his first tweet “just setting up my twttr”, Twitter has gone public.
While I appreciate Twitter greatly on its effort to connect the world with chirps, sadly, I’ve never been a big fan of it. It is not the 140 characters limit that holds me up, it is the lost of context of conversation when I interact with others back and forth — every response I write becomes one entry in my own tweet list, and when I look back at my old tweets, I can’t remember what topics I was responding to in the first place. This drives me nuts. It has been bothering me since the beginning, so Twitter ends up becoming my news feed — a place I go to “look at” stuff, rather than interact.
But, that’s just me. I think Twitter is still awesome for people that like to note down quick thoughts and share them publicly.
This makes me wonder what future digital communication styles could become. As technology advances, connects people and organizes conversations under certain subjects (e.g. books), how is communication itself going to change? There may be a lot of ideas on how it can be presented, but I think “keeping it a conversation” is not going to go away.
I’ve heard a lot about hot discussions on getting services from a chat-based interface, for example, WeChat lets you “chat” with a bank to get your account balance, Facebook Messenger lets you “chat” to book a Uber taxi. It’s cool to put the relationship between “we” and the “services” in a conversation style, because it feels like I’m talking to my virtual personal assistant to get things done. It’s personal and private.
Are there going to be new ways that conversations get carried over among people? A fascinating topic that probably doesn’t have an answer just yet.