Ev Bogue"Often learning a new tool requires unlearning the old one. The habits of using a land line phone don't work in email or cell phone. The habits of email don't work in twitter. The habits of twitter won't work in what is next." -- Kevin Kelly
I untethered from Twitter on June 13th 2011. This article explains why I left.
I'm not saying that you need to leave. I'd just like to draw attention to what Twitter was, and what has been lost as the service devolves.
You can make your own decision about whether Twitter is working for you, or not.
Untethering can sometimes be incredibly hard. It's especially hard when I've put years of blood, sweat, and effort into learning a tool.
When the tool begins to lose its usefulness in the work, this results in confusion for me, my work, and the people I connect with.
This usually means it's time for an untether.
In any untethering, it's important to look back in time at where the root of tether began to grow. In the investigation, I learn the reasons that I initially started using, why I continued, and why we're so connected now at the moment before I decide to let go.
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I signed up for Twitter when it first launched in 2006 -- because it was big tech news and everyone I knew who knew anything about the Internet jumped on. But I didn't understand the tool at all until September 2009.
I was sitting alone in my room in Portland. My yoga mat was rolled out on the floor in the middle of the carpeted floor. The room smelled like old carpet and incense. I'd been sitting, practicing, and watching the rain fall outside my window. A single street light always shined through a large maple tree in front of my shared apartment on the 2nd floor of a small house.
A month before I'd quit my job in New York, thrown everything I could carry into a backpack, and hopped onto a plane from New York to Portland without a plan.
I'd started a blog called Far Beyond The Stars. I wanted to get the word out about my work, but I didn't know how.
I was experimenting with Twitter, but it wasn't quite working for me. I didn't know who to reach out to, and why I should care at all.
Then I read Seth Godin's Tribes at Powell's as I sipped a coffee and watched hipsters walk by in the rain.
Something about leading on the web clicked when I read Tribes.
I wrote a blog post about minimalism, crafted it (somewhat) well, gave it a good headline. At the bottom I put a call to action:
"If you liked this post, it'd really help me if you'd take a moment to retweet it."
I put a retweet button under the post.
In the coming weeks, this became the most successful strategy that I employed on my blog. Pretty soon my blog was going out to an audience of 10,000s+ per month just over Twitter, because of the retweet.
I was hooked, in love, and extremely grateful.
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Then, at the end of 2010, a lot of things started to go wrong with Twitter.
If I could pinpoint one thing, it was the launch of "New Twitter", the web interface that many people use on Twitter today. Alex Payne (an ex-employee of Twitter, and amazing tech writer) wrote in depth about the effect New Twitter had on the development community, company culture, and Twitter user base.
A few other events happened with Twitter: The new retweet removed the credit I received for sharing quality links. Twitter told their developer community to stop developing clients for the service, cancelled their development summit, and purchased Tweetdeck -- the client I used for much of my time on Twitter. When big companies purchase clients, it's usually to halt development.
All of the above have led to uncertainty for developers and early adopters of the service.
...and so the exodus began: with uncertainty about the future of the service comes an incentive for users and developers who depend on the service to start looking for new ways to support their business.
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Apple recently announced that Twitter will be integrated with iOS5 and the new Mac OS.
I've been asked whether I believe this will change things. Will more people using Twitter from their devices improve the service? The answer: I don't know.
What I do know is: Apple users will be able to share my website with a click of a button from any Apple product. This means that it doesn't matter if I'm on Twitter or not, the content will still be shared.
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With any untethering, it's important to appreciate what I gained from the experience, as I say goodbye:
Many of the people who I call my closest friends are people I met on Twitter. Now, I have their cell numbers, their email address, and many invitations to crash on their floors.
Twitter enabled me to get tea and/or beers with many amazing people, who I previously would have thought unreachable.
Much of the early success of Far Beyond The Stars was because of distribution on Twitter.
...and sometimes when I was lonely on a dark stormy night, I was able to reach out into the tech and instantly hear the voice of a real person saying: "It's going to be okay."
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Every online community has a growth period, a heyday, and then either slips into obscurity or becomes a lasting tool that everyone takes for granted.
I've been on the web for nearly 15 years now. During that time I watched as Geocities, Livejournal, Blogger, Flickr, all became the hot shit only to fade into obsolescence.
Blogger and Flickr are fundamental tools that many people still use. However, what many people don't remember is the community that sprung up on these services in the beginning. When Blogger was purchased by Google, the community jumped ship for the next thing. When Flickr was purchased by Yahoo, the community disbanded for many smaller photographer showcases and platforms that many of us don't even know about.
What I found was that as Twitter started redirecting the retweet button for their own uses (the "new retweet" as mentioned above), the "one to many" functionality that many of us came to count on began to disintegrate.
I used to be able to send a tweet linking to a phenomenal blog post (mine or someone else's, it didn't matter) and watch as it was retweeted 50-200 times over the course of an hour on Tweetdeck. For most of the last six months, this viral loop stopped happening.
When I look at where people are finding my website these days (and quite a lot of people are landing on the site), I don't see results from social media anymore.
In fact, what I'm seeing was closer to a 1:1 ratio to my interactions.
When a 1:200 ratio turns to a 1:1 ratio, I'm better off standing on a corner with a sign than tweeting.
So, I decided to opt out.
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I'll continue writing on evbogue.com until the next vehicle arrives.
I'm taking a digital sabbatical for the month of July.