Twitter Results are being misjudged…
Tomorrow the short-messaging social network will reveal its numbers and the analysts will gasp, the pundits will swoon, and everybody will say that Twitter needs to be fixed.
But that’s not the truth at all.
By Wall Street standards Twitter’s a diving joke. A company that’s hit a financial wall with no obvious upside.
By cultural standards it’s a juggernaut, far exceeding the impact of Facebook and Snapchat, even Instagram.
How can this be?
You see our nation has gone topsy-turvy, it’s all about the money.
It’s ruined the arts and it’s ruining business. If you’re not making a ton of dough and increasing the number every quarter you’re falling behind, out of the conversation. And yes, an entity needs cash flow to survive, but how much? And isn’t impact more important than money, especially when it comes to changing the conversation?
Look at Tesla.
Anemic by automobile standards, gargantuan regarding impact, it took the electric car off the shelf and put it back into the conversation.
But Tesla’s stock is through the roof, for now anyway, defying all realistic fundamentals. Let’s focus instead on BMW, which has lost the sales crown to Mercedes-Benz.
BMW is a juggernaut of innovation. Do you think we’d see all those features in Hondas and Chevys if it weren’t for the bleeding edge developers? Of course not!
Not that automobiles are a perfect analogy.
The point being, someone has got to lead. Someone has to move the conversation forward and that all happens on Twitter.
While Facebook is trying to find out how to stop people killing others on live video, everybody in the news business is addicted to their Twitter feed. They want to know what is happening, right now.
And the reporters go there for info and the outlets post their latest findings and unlike Facebook or Google it’s not curated by an algorithm, but by the users themselves.
You follow who you want to, and when they prove to be worthless, inane, boring or all three, you mute them and move on.
And it turns out most people have no powers of analysis and they can’t figure out how to work anything mildly complicated. They just want to be seen as important, and Twitter fails on all those accounts.
For years we heard about people tweeting their every move.
If you think this is how Twitter still works, you’re probably e-mailing your friends jokes on AOL.
Twitter has moved on.
The looky-loos have long departed. The self-righteous wannabes tweeting over a hundred thousand times are living in their own tiny silos, in their own echo chambers.
That’s one of the great things about Twitter. When you see somebody hating on you you can check them out and in almost all cases they have almost no followers and no one sees the hate, so you can relax. This is not the network television of yore. This is one jerk with a megaphone in the middle of the prairie with no impact.
So you’ve got experts in every field tweeting about their findings or what interests them.
When breaking news occurs a hive emerges with tons of data.
Is it sometimes wrong? Of course!
But so is mainstream news!
And if you can’t ferret between the true and false, if you can’t adjust on the fly, you don’t deserve to be on Twitter. You need remedial reading classes.
And Twitter is where the President makes his pronouncements.
It’s all happening on Twitter.
But we’ve got to listen to the people who ruined this country, the financial sector, hate on the company.
Can it be improved? Sure!
Does it need to be a standalone entity? Absolutely not. But one thing’s for sure, we need a source for real time news, and so far no one else is coming close to Twitter.
So celebrate the company that is driving the zeitgeist – where all stories get started – where those addicted to news live.
Newspapers come second.
Television is a comparative joke.
And everybody worth their salt in either medium is right there on Twitter, whether it be Rachel Maddow or Margaret Sullivan.
If you don’t care, if you don’t want to play, that’s fine.
The fact that more people would rather revisit high school, post cat videos and doctor images that make them look amazing is irrelevant.
It’s like looking to the Kardashian sisters to push the cultural envelope as opposed to Gustavo Dudamel.
We want people to make us think. We want to know where it’s all going and what it all means.
And there’s no better place to do this than on Twitter.
Financial metrics be damned!
Yeah, don’t lie, you had to look up Margaret Sullivan too.
Wouldn’t people having to look up Margaret Sullivan be prima facie that Bobby is livng in his very own “silo”?
Bobby is frenetically insistent that we, as he is, must have holes in our souls if we are not connected to the culture, as interpreted by current events, with the latest devices, using the latest technology, which, in turn are then parsed by “leaders”, who exist in Silos, where everyone, of course, knows without even having to look it up, who the fuck Margaret Sullivan is.
” That’s one of the great things about Twitter. When you see somebody hating on you you can check them out and in almost all cases they have almost no followers and no one sees the hate, so you can relax…”
“…so you can relax…”
I am picturing poor Bobby as Keanu Reves in that vat of jell in the Matrix with all those wires, tubes and the latest 21st Century technology hooked up, shoved up and ramped into every one of his orifices.
Bobby, as a card carrying member of the way to fuck far left, should remember the great Timothy Leary. “Tune in, turn on and drop out.”
I read recently where everyone should drop acid every decade or so, it is supposed to bring perspective and a measure of compos mentis, which, Bobby is in desperate need of.
If you are checking your Twitter Feed constantly to see if your “enemies/haters” have enough followers to challenge your own personal Gravitas Meter, then you are fucked.
Do dome drugs, have a beer and if someone doesn’t like you, tell them to go fuck themselves.
What are dome drugs and where might I score some?
Thank you in advance.
The comment was extemporaneous and with no edit.
Thank you for the “catch”.
I am sorry for my misspelling.
🙂