Evan Williams, Twitter’s CEO was interviewed on the BBC’s Newsnight on wednesday and what followed was a rather embarrassing display of the ignorance towards new technology, poor editiorial decisions and by no means quality journalism in any sense of the word.
Kirsty Wark was given the pleasure of reading out a list of questions submitted by a mixture of Twitter users and readers of the Newsnight blog. What a fantastic opportunity this is to probe Twitter’s CEO about how they plan to make money or how they see their service developing in the future. But instead, what should have been a interesting and probing first UK interview by one of the BBC’s most grilling presenters, ended up being rather cringeworthy list of questions that echoed the arguments that pretty much every non-twitter user seems to come up with when they decide they don’t really understand the point in it.
Williams must have been more than a little bit baffled that in his first UK interview, he was answering questions such as “Isn’t this just really a service for reading what famous people are doing?” and “But do you feel comfortable about the fact that when you go on Twitter, and you look for Demi Moore, there’s several Demi Moores, you can’t verify who the real Demi Moore is – does that not worry you?”. Huh, Evan? Is that what keeps you up at night? I’m sure the fact that your company has been around since 2006, is projecting 25 million users by the end of the year and hasn’t yet made any decent money out it makes you sleep like a baby. Figuring out who the real Demi Moore is must be a real pillow turner.
These are questions that he probably thought Twitter had cleared up a long time ago.
Then there was the bombshell, “are you aware that the archbishop Vincent Nichols is very concerned that Twitter dehumanises a very important part of our social life?”. Despite the fact that – as Shane Richmond points out in the Telegraph – Vincent Nichols didn’t mention anything about Twitter, this again is a classic case of a person attacking something that they have never used and don’t really understand. Williams replied quite rightly arguing “I would say that anyone who says that isn’t really familiar with the service, because it’s about humans connecting with each other, and often in ways that they couldn’t otherwise. It’s the opposite of dehumanising as far as I’m concerned”.
Thankfully, the interview gave us one interesting snippet. London is now the biggest twitter-using city in the world. That is, the biggest local community using Twitter. If you’ve ever used Twitter and are connected to people within your city, you’ll probably know as well as I do, the fantastic connections it helps you to make, the inspiring knowledge sharing it allows for and the vibrant dialogue it encourages. And if that isn’t “rounded communication” I don’t know what is.
Thanks to @CharlesArthur for providing a transcript of the interview.
August 6, 2009
social media