Twitter gets Time cover – enough already!
Twitter is cool. OK, we get it. Twitter is also becoming very popular, having hit the mainstream in the past few months. OK, we get it. But what I don’t get and what we don’t need are more and more publications waxing lyrical about the micro-blogging service. Seriously, enough already. Yes, I’m talking to you, Time Magazine.
Time Magazine has put Twitter on its cover, which though not the coveted acknowledgment of greatness it once was, is still pretty damn special. Along with the cover, Time has written a mind-bogglingly long article extolling the virtues of Twitter, describing why it’s the best thing since sliced bread, and imagining how it’s going to change the world.
The conclusion to the article has to be one of the least compelling articles for greatness I have ever seen:
We are living through the worst economic crisis in generations, with apocalyptic headlines threatening the end of capitalism as we know it, and yet in the middle of this chaos, the engineers at Twitter headquarters are scrambling to keep the servers up, application developers are releasing their latest builds, and ordinary users are figuring out all the ingenious ways to put these tools to use. There’s a kind of resilience here that is worth savoring. The weather reports keep announcing that the sky is falling, but here we are — millions of us — sitting around trying to invent new ways to talk to one another.
So, in a nutshell, we’re in the middle of a recession but Twitter is letting us communicate with each other. Are money worries and communication really that unusual of bed fellows? Why wouldn’t we all continue to talk to each other, no matter what the economy happens to be doing? Did we all stop using the telephone during the last big economic downturn?
I like Twitter, I’m a fan of the 140-characters way of communicating. I also think Twitter will be around for a good long time. But it is, at the end of the day, simply another tool for us all to communicate; no different from the telephone, email, or instant messaging. But probably a lot less important and game-changing than any of those three methods.
Time was always going to do a piece on Twitter eventually. After all, everyone else already has and it wouldn’t want to look out of sync with the world. But it’s a little unnecessary when pretty much everything that has to be said about Twitter already has been. At least until it evolves, as it will have to, in order to make money.
I think the Time cover should be the end of all the attention being lavished on Twitter. We’ve surely had enough. Oprah Winfrey was the beginning of the end, Ashton Kutcher was when the rot set in, now Time should be the period on the end of the sentence. Let Twitter live without giving it credit for solving the world’s problems.
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