$ 2.5 million. This is currently the highest bid for founder Jack Dorsey’s first Twitter entry. “just setting up my twttr”, he wrote on March 21, 2006 at 12:50 pm as @jack, This piece of contemporary history is of course not simply printed out and framed, but sent as a “Non-Fungible Token” (NFT) with Dorsey’s digital signature and the metadata of the entry. NFTs use blockchain technology, and that’s not the only reason why the symbolism of this auction could hardly be bigger. A tweet as NFT that sounds a bit like a dinosaur in a rocket to Mars.
Twitter has been around for 15 years now, in the digital years it’s an eternity, the company is a dinosaur – also because the platform has changed in about the same way as a stegosaurus over the past 65 million years: not at all. The only change people remember was doubling the possible characters to 280 in 2017, and it didn’t need more. The relevance of Twitter lies in the fact that anyone with Internet access is allowed to express their opinion, which in recent years has often been reduced to the blaring of Donald Trump and the squabbling of the various camps on political and social issues.
During this time, other platforms have emerged, the current pop culture debates revolve around the would-be-exclusive Laber-Salon Clubhouse and the video app Tiktok. Many have disappeared again, and it is interesting that two of the more famous platforms, the Tiktok predecessor Vine and the video app Periscope, belonged to Twitter. It is quite possible that Dorsey, who now looks like he’s either moderating clubhouse debates around the clock or hunting dinosaurs with a quarantine mustache, has barely changed Twitter precisely in order to stay in this political-social niche.
“Dangerous precedent”
Only: Trump has not tweeted since Dorsey banned him. He called it a “right decision for Twitter”, which however shows as a “dangerous precedent” that the platform was not able to enable “healthy and fruitful discussions”. Snapchat (265 million daily active users) has already overtaken Twitter (192 million) and is more popular with young people, Tiktok (around 50 million in the US, the company does not publish official figures) and the only eleven-month-old clubhouse (ten million ) catch up. “The criticism focuses on three points,” says Dorsey. “We are slow, we are not innovative, there is a lack of trust.” With a dinosaur one would say: not ready for the ice age.
Twitter recently bought numerous companies: the social media start-up Squad, the podcast platform Breaker, the design company Ueno and the Dutch newsletter platform Revue. It seems as if Dorsey is about to build a few possible roads at a fork in the road for his company to experiment which route he would like to take. Last year, the hedge fund Elliot Management bought four percent of the shares in Twitter and tried to get rid of Dorsey as boss on the grounds that he was due to his dual role (he runs the fintech company Square, which is currently running the Tidal music service from the rapper entrepreneur Jay-Z bought) too little focus on the evolution of Twitter.
Dorsey, 44, has reached an agreement with the hedge fund, but it’s true: he has to develop Twitter without imitating the competition. The short videos Fleets look a lot like entries on Snapchat or Instagram Stories, the audio offering Spaces is reminiscent of a clubhouse. On the other hand, everything seems much more interesting where the platform remains in the socially relevant niche, but with innovative offers – for example, the possibility for users to moderate potentially poisoned debates under their entries and to approach those who are allowed to have a say reduce that they follow themselves.
“At the moment, all the small measures do not add up to a whole.”
Further options are, for example, newsletters for which authors can be paid – a journalistic format that is currently very popular. The attraction of platforms such as Snapchat, Tiktok or Instagram is that creative people can earn money there – on Twitter it is often just a reference to journalistic content (self-promotion often culminates in the expression “my text about it”). Twitter not only plans newsletters, but also “Super Follows”, which indicate willingness to pay for a user’s content. Building on this, there should be a group function this year, in which moderators can set their own rules and thus possibly cool down debates a little without talking about “censorship” again.
“You are currently experimenting with a lot of small things – what I would like to see: a long-term vision,” says Jessica Liu of the analysis firm Forrester: “All the small measures currently do not fit into a larger whole.” If Dorsey has proven one thing in recent years, it is this: He has the courage to make uncomfortable decisions (the end of Periscope and Vine, the measures against Trump) without being actionist. The investors seem to believe him, that shows not the 2.5 million dollar bid for his first tweet, but above all the share price: It is currently higher than ever before, and because that is always a bet is the future of a company, the digital dinosaur seems to be in pretty good shape.
– .
