Snippet: Twitter is Old Media ☇

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.