The Atlantic has a lengthy piece describing what it calls the twilight of Twitter:
Twitter is the platform that led us into the mobile Internet age. It broke our habit of visiting individual news homepages first thing in the morning, and established behaviors built around real-time news consumption and production. It normalized mobile publishing power. It changed our expectations about how we congregate around shared events. Twitter has done for social publishing what AOL did for email. But nobody has AOL accounts anymore.
As someone who is generally a fairly heavy Twitter user, I went into the piece intending to scoff at the premise. But there’s a valid point in there: the service and the feel of it has changed. There are still great sub-networks where the effects discussed in this piece aren’t as evident, but if you’ve spent much time investing into the culture of Twitter, you’ll have noticed these things.
At its best, Twitter can be one of the most fun places to frequent on the web. At its worst, it can be awful in ways it didn’t used to be. I’m conflicted about calling it a twilight when it could just be a phase, but it’s clear The Atlantic is accurately describing something, even if I’m not sure about the conclusions.
