BYE-BYE, BIRDIE MY PLAN TO BLOW UP TWITTER

摘要

Twitter is a mess. Moments? Yeah, no. Old users are annoyed; new users don't get it. Harassers are legion. Top talent is jumping ship. The stock price keeps falling. Cofounder and old-new CEO Jack Dorsey insists that Twitter's mission remains the same: It's a public messaging service that allows anyone's voice to reverberate instantly around the world. Fine! There's just one problem-messaging has fundamentally changed. This is the age of Snapchat, where you send something and, poof, it's gone. Tweets, on the other hand, last forever. That's why you agonize over those 140 characters, second-guessing your bad puns or tasteless jokes. Sure, you can delete single tweets, but weird social pressure practically forbids it. So instead, like so many tattoos, your history of ill-advised off-the-cuff spasms of verbal outrage becomes a permanent reminder of all the temporary feels. This is not sustainable. But the solution is simple: Tweets must be transitory. Imagine joining conversations without feeling like your thoughts will come back to haunt you. Imagine a function that lets you set a tweet to expire along with a joke (#thedress, the GOP debates). Imagine being able to wipe your feed once a month, or once a week, as the news cycle shifts. Imagine, really, the ability to delete all your old tweets en masse. The glory! The freedom! (Third-party services will do this for you already, proving the desperate need.) Never worry about overtweeting again. Face-book is already our digital archive; Twitter should be our town hall. So @jack, live in the moment-this moment-and please, oh please, free the tweet.