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Maureen Dowd, can you hear me now?
Maureen Dowd is not everyone's cup of tea. Her columns can seem a little airy for some tastes. Now, she's apparently turned from politics to technology. After an interview/column in which she tried to pin the demise of the newspaper business on Google's Eric Schmidt, Dowd has turned her ire on Twitter. She interviewed Twitter's Biz Stone and Evan Williams and summed up her feelings thusly: "I would rather be tied up to stakes in the Kalahari Desert, have honey poured over me and red ants eat out my eyes than open a Twitter account." Copywriter Nancy Friedman, aka @Fritinancy, has a dead-on response: a re-imagining of Dowd's column as a discussion about the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell. Sample question from Dowd to Bell: "Did you know you were designing a toy for bored housewives and the indolent rich?" Let's not go overboard: Twitter is not the telephone. But what Dowd and even many of Twitter's most vehement proponents sometimes miss is it's really just a tool—an incredibly useful albeit sometimes frustrating one. —Posted by Brian Morrissey |
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April 23, 2009 in News and Analysis | Permalink |
Comments
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Good points. And at least Twitter only lets you talk at 140 characters/post. Without the message cap, can you imagine how annoying that would be?
Posted by: eric | Apr 23, 2009 4:03:10 PM
Twitter - The CB radio for Internet Age.
Posted by: GoodBuddy | Apr 24, 2009 12:29:41 AM
I think it's worth pointing out that while Twitter is not the telephone, neither was the device A.G Bell developed. The first commercially available telephone wasn't "the telephone" either.
Like Bell's device, Twitter is still young technology. It's current form may prove to be useless, but it will be refined through use just as users and companies moved beyond operators, switchboards and the strange device pictured in this post.
CB radio proved to be a fad, true. But we all carry little radios made by Apple and RIM in our pockets now, so some part of that technology endured long enough for infrastructure to develop.
Maybe the product "Twitter" won't last, but the behavior of tweeting might.
Posted by: Jeromy Lloyd | Apr 24, 2009 10:09:21 AM
Good response to an internet neophyte.
Posted by: Lisa Russell | Apr 24, 2009 10:43:38 AM
When I was a kid faced with a new dish on the dinner table I was always told to try it (3 times actually) before I determined that I hated it.
Dowd dosen't follow this simple rule. How can she know she hates twitter without giving it a try - or three?
I've been using twitter for over a year. Sometimes I hate it.
Posted by: greg padley | Apr 24, 2009 10:49:39 AM
I like how her second or third question to Schmidt is a loaded appeal for cash. It's like when a hobo stuffs his baseball cap in your face and then curses at you for not throwing money his way.
Posted by: Rich Tseng | Apr 24, 2009 11:08:34 AM
Oh dear... The "Twitterati" are ganging up on Maureen Dowd 'cos she doesn't get it... Actually, I think she she does get it. Her interview with the founders of Twitter showed they were as intellectually shallow as their uber creation in terms of it being little more than a communications platform for the linguistically challenged... Ooops, sorry, I have gone over my 140 character limit... I will have to Re-Tweet, after I have bored the shit out of you with my breakfast menu and latest bowel movement.
Cheers/George
Posted by: George Parker | Apr 24, 2009 11:20:00 PM
The question isn't whether the technology is right or not. And it's not about whether people will want to use it for spreading meaningless drivel or not. Judging by phone use in my household 99 % of all calls are simply social and not necessarily necessary.
Quite frankly, even at work most so called business calls are not that necessary. (Neither are most e-mails or sms's. Or meetings.) However, the phone started out being a rather expensive "toy". It rather quickly became a lucrative business. For Twitter and other social media tools It's the long term money aspect that's the question.
Posted by: tore claesson | Apr 25, 2009 10:02:11 AM
Um. I don't know where that comment attributed to me came from... I didn't write that...
Posted by: greg padley | May 1, 2009 9:12:57 AM
