Of all the rhetorical points that Dalton makes, this one was the most damning for me:
>>> His announcement was formatted as a direct reply to the official Twitter account.
This means the announcement would only be seen by his followers that also follow the official Twitter account. I don’t get the feeling he did this on purpose. An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so that his followers would see it.
>>
It seems a bit pedantic. But when top-down leaders don't get even the basic details of their operations right, then there are a lot of other big-picture things that they seem to get wrong as well. In the case of MySpace's crushing defeat by Facebook, the difference really was in the details, not in the overall ambitions of the two companies.
To be fair to Chernin, he's a board member, not a leadership executive. Most Twitter employees will never meet him and many may not even know who he is (or the other board members). Smaller companies have a board that's much closer to the employees, where it's not uncommon for senior employees to be in frequent contact with individual board members for advice. Larger companies will have boards that are far more diverse and typically far from the product. For example, Apple has the Chairman of Avon and the former Chairman/CEO of Northrop Grumman.
It's a small embarrassment to Chernin to bobble his first Tweet. The more interesting story is that he's a Hollywood deal maker, and that's more reflective of Twitter's aspirations. While he may have said some stuff about MySpace when he was at News Corp, he's really a media entertainment guy.
Not only that, but it's also a bit of a stretch to draw any connection between NewsCorp's stewardship of MySpace and Twitter's developer strategy. There is no real connection there.
Chernin is not going to be leading or planning developer-relations strategies for the platform. Most likely, to your point, he's going to be there to develop content and media partnerships. He's one of the most powerful and connected people in Hollywood, and has been for 30-something years now. That's the value he's bringing. He's not a tech guy, nor does Twitter need him to be.
Small, mildly embarrassing flub of a first tweet, but Dalton's drawing way too many far-out inferences from it.
Sorry, I know I'm being dense, I just don't see Hollywood stuff in my feed very often at all.
And if Twitter is talking up Hollywood, doesn't that mean Hollywood needs Twitter more than Twitter needs a board member with connections into Hollywood?
A lot of famous people are on Twitter and some have rather large followings. Many interact with their fans daily (rather than just pushing out announcements). I thought that this was one of the big draws that brought more average people to the platform.
Not only this, but with respect to news media outlets, a number of their reporters/talking heads have active Twitter accounts.
Also, just because Hollywood can benefit from Twitter doesn't mean that they are going to show up at their door begging for a deal.
This is a fair and worthwhile distinction...still, Twitter is one of those services that seems hard to "get" without a good college-try at it -- I only joined because our company more-or-less said everyone should make an account. And now I'm thankful that happened because the mechanisms of Twitter make it a unique platform for consuming and sharing information...and yet without using it, I could not be convinced that it was nothing more than blogging for people who liked blogging about really trivial things.
Before the rise of Twitter's own official client, it really was an elegant way to handle the problem of having a minimal interface (i.e. no reply button). But yes, it was basically something you wouldn't "get" unless someone told you, or you used twitter enough to eventually notice that someone's direct-tweet did not make it into your overall timeline.
And the many screwups with direct-messages is pretty well known...
I'm not certain that's fair. They grew by an order of magnitude every half year or so. That's very difficult to keep up with, especially when you have no idea how to turn all those signups into money.
I followed the entire thing and was trying to use the site, too... my impression is that there was an equal mixture of legitimate challenge met well, and incompetence/bad decisions.
Hey, Quora got slightly less obnoxious about blocking their content. Finally. Just a week or two ago, I followed a link to Quora and they were still doing the scummy old Experts Exchange trick of blurring out most of the answers.
This is the exact reason Twitter needs to change or accept it will never have true long-term mass market appeal. It's UX is targeted at geeks and not for the average user. This was great for getting off the ground, but the fact that these things still exist is pretty sad. I'm not at all surprised their new CEO didn't get this. In fact it underlies the need for the to pivot even more.
I'm still confused. If I'm on someone's profile, the tweet box already includes @user. So if I go ahead and tweet in that box, it will not show up in my follower's feeds? It was not a "reply".
I would agree that's totally broken but live feeds aren't even usable past 10 or 20 followees anyway so maybe it doesn't matter that much?
It's not pedantic. That one character has a huge influence over how many people will see the tweet. This wasn't some minor style screwup that only nerds will even care about, it was a technical screwup that strongly affected the distribution of the message.
>>> His announcement was formatted as a direct reply to the official Twitter account.
This means the announcement would only be seen by his followers that also follow the official Twitter account. I don’t get the feeling he did this on purpose. An experienced Twitter user would know to add a “.” at the beginning of his message so that his followers would see it. >>
It seems a bit pedantic. But when top-down leaders don't get even the basic details of their operations right, then there are a lot of other big-picture things that they seem to get wrong as well. In the case of MySpace's crushing defeat by Facebook, the difference really was in the details, not in the overall ambitions of the two companies.