Sometime I think the only reason I stay at the forward margins of the adoption curve is to spite neurotic curmudgeons like Dowd. Biz Stone did nothing worse than to create a trivial little message service, and Dowd comes at him like a mean-spirited 9 year-old girl on the playground.
ME: Did you know you were designing a toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls?
BIZ: We definitely didn’t design it for that. If they want to use it for that, it’s great.
It’s worth reading if only to be impressed that Dowd managed to get a Pulitzer in the 90s for her Lewinsky coverage.
Ahh, I think that interview is more playful than anything else. Her choice of what to include of his responses is definitely flattering to him.
And you got me all eager for some Maureen Dowd-hating. She gets on my nerves most of the time because she’s so cutesy about topics I want to hear substantive things about (and I know she’s capable of talking substantially, which makes it all the more frustrating). But with a topic like this, the cutesyness is less obnoxious….but then, i guess that all depends on one’s relationship to the topic.
Sure, maybe it was playful. Playful like a bad joke. One the co-founders (Evan) walks out on it, although Biz is clearly more amused.
Point is, the joke wasn’t very funny. And absolutely absent curiosity.
Plus, I bet that those likely were more or less exactly Biz’s responses. That’s how he speaks, briefly, charmingly and with good enough humor to ride out the “interview.”
So if they didn’t design it for high school girls and bored celebrities, which I took to mean communicating trivial aspects of people’s lives, then what did they design it for?
Though I agree that’s probably the most useless interview I’ve ever read. Maybe she’s trying on her Fox shoes– mockingly attempted to confirm an entrenched opinion while failing to elicit or decipher anything meaningful out of the interviewees. Wait, what else was in there that she edited out?
*attempting
Jake: They designed Twitter to fill a hole in the communications market for short-form, subscriber-based broadcasts.
It is simply a tweak of a very old form of communication (telegram, text) that has been used for centuries for every purpose from gossip to war-declarations.
Communication platforms are content-neutral. Just because television is used for trite celebrity BS doesn’t mean that is what television is for, you follow?
I’ve used twitter for everything from asking for help with linux (and promptly getting that help from strangers), to getting as-it-happens live news updates, to, yes, broadcasting my own minutia that a couple dozen people DO legitimately care to hear.
Other people use if for all kinds of different stuff, from forming a haiku community, to perfecting dick jokes, to discussing high-politics.
one time i saw a b-movie about dicks that was sooooo bad.
how bad was it?
i was COCKsure about leaving the theater!
No, Ethan, I don’t follow, ever since I fell on my fucking head I’ve never quite been the same.
During the course of my response to your response, I realized that if I was going to write so much I should post it in a format in which more in-depth analysis would be appropriate, though it will probably be two weeks (exam time) before I actually get to it.
*also, and it may be a typo, it’s “minutiae,” unless you’re talking about something like THE detail of your life.
Before you splatter that bald fucking melon of yours over four walls, I’d like to qualify that it’s not that I don’t think your website is a valuable platform for intelligent discourse, but I do believe that personal ideas and perspectives are better expressed through a medium of one’s own making; this is especially applicable when those ideas differ vastly from your host’s.
“hugs”
That was your anti-spam word, not what I do to you.
i once saw a b-movie about dicks that was soooo bad.
how bad was it?
the only coming attraction was a commercial for that local asian market, you know, Kim and WANG’s!
That’s cool Jake, looking forward to it!
To use my words: By the TV example, I mean that you ought not conflate what a medium is MOSTLY used for with what it is ALWAYS USED FOR.
Even if a communications platform (twitter, tv broadcasting, radio, et al) is used for 85% non-valuable purposes, that is not the same as the platform being “for” non-valuable purposes.
I think the vast majority of radio programs are banal and repetitive, but I’m REALLY glad I’ve engaged the medium because of programs like This American Life and college radio.
I think the vast majority of twitter users DO post asinine nonsense that makes only them and a few others happy, but I’m really glad I engaged the medium because of writers like John Dickerson and Scott Simpson.
In a phrase: In evaluating a communications platform, we ought not throw the baby out with the bath water.
Make sense?
Also, don’t get me wrong:
I am WICKED ANNOYED by all this Twitter hype too.
Also, Also, ALEX WE ARE TRY TO BE SERIOUS.
And also, also, also, good luck with finals to both of ya.
we are try to be serious? obviously not!
oh you rascal!