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What’s Happening?

November 20th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter

I can’t remember my first tweet, but I do remember one thing–it did not answer the question “what are you doing?” Conceived originally as a mobile status service, for years Twitter operated under that prompt.

“People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question,” writes co-founder Biz Stone. Users were “seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, ‘What’s happening?’ A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.”

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

In a post discussing the change, social web genius Brian Solis elaborates on how we have grown to use Twitter: “Our updates on Twitter symbolize so much more than we may realize. If, for but a moment, we can catch a fleeting glimpse of our personal significance right here, right now, we would recognize our instrumental role in the complete transformation in how information is reported, discovered, broadcast, and consumed. Perhaps most significantly, Twitter represents a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. As such, Twitter is a human seismograph. Through it, we feel everything that moves us.”

Yes, but this has always been the case for most of us. What does the change actually mean?

“We don’t expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter,” said Stone. “But maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad.”

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What’s Happening?

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