Snippet: Twitter is Old Media ☇

Shared on September 7, 2012

Edd Dumbill points out that Twitter is betraying its new media roots and acting more like the media companies we love to hate (via David Chartier):

Twitter’s bait-and-switch, now they’ve built their reach on the back of eager early adopters, is disappointing. It marks them as part of old, unenlightened, business, and consigns them to a far less remarkable place in the future economy than they otherwise might have had.

I think it was +Jeff Jarvis who observed around the time of the Olympics that Twitter have become an old-style media company. These actions validate that completely. Twitter is turning into cable TV.

I never thought of this before, but the more Twitter closes itself off, the more it comes across like a cable company preventing unauthorized boxes and modems. Mix in the constant hashtags and @names showing up on TV and the last line of George Orwell’s Animal Farm starts to feel just a tad applicable:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Snippets are posts that share a linked item with a bit of commentary.