Tag: Twitter

Why is Twitter Twitter?

Twitter may be declining in popularity among teens, but popularity among teens is never what made Twitter important (insofar as it is important), or what gives Twitter its specific edge.

Twitter is able to remain vital for, among other things, two very important reasons: it is text-first, and it is web-first.

Text is scannable, copyable, translatable, accessible, quotable, searchable, screenshot-able, remix-able, parody-able, and on and on in ways that video and images are not.

The web is linkable, ubiquitous, and accessible in ways that mobile apps are not.

Twitter is the easiest way to put text on the web. While it may be a private, closed platform, and may be entirely irrelevant in some near future, its success is a testament to the strengths of text, the web, and the URL

Any technology that wants to be similarly relevant would do well to embrace these.

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Google’s Left Margin or: Hey, Twitter’s Good for Something

I noticed a short while ago that the left margin on Google’s search results pages seemed to have increased, and the logo’s size decreased. I asked a friend if he’d noticed, and he said that he hadn’t.

I searched Google for ‘google left margin,’ turning up no results. Of course, if it only happened this morning, nothing written about it would likely have been indexed by Google yet — unless they blogged about adding a dozen pixels to their margin, which seemed unlikely. But I had a hunch that if other people were noticing it, they must be talking about it, somewhere.

That somewhere, of course, is Twitter, where my suspicion was confirmed. The tagline for search.twitter.com (See what’s happening — right now.) is right — there’s really no better place to go to find out what people are saying about something that happened between five minutes and a couple hours ago.

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