Admitting you are wrong in public is deeply unpleasant and fundamentally good for you, like a colonoscopy. So here goes: I was wrong about Twitter.
When the microblogging service launched in 2006, 16 years before it was bought by Elon Musk, I thought it sounded pointless. Co-founder Jack Dorsey described a tweet as “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and I thought, that sounds about right. I probably said this publicly somewhere—most likely Facebook or some blogging platform. What’s the difference, I remember writing, in a post lost to time and the bowels of The Internet Archive, between a tweet and a Facebook status update? Aren’t they basically the same thing? Here’s what I had for lunch: blah blah blah. And why join a platform that only allows you to write a sentence or two at a time—nothing longer than 140 characters?
