Vicerrectora de Investigaciones, Extensin y Proyeccin Social

Facultad de Ciencias Humanas

Cursos Libres de Lenguas Extranjeras
Plan Lector 2014-I
Nivel IV

CAN TWITTER PASS THE TEXT?

BY: TIM CARMODY
(From Newsweek Magazine)
Carmody, T. (2013). Can Twitter Pass the Test. Newsweek. Volumen 46. Pginas 44 y 45.

Facebook was the last great innovation of the desktop era; Twitter is the first great
innovation of the mobile era.

THERE ARE MANY stories you can tell someone who doesnt "get" Twitter, or maybe just
doesnt understand how it can become a business large enough to be traded on the New
York Stock Exchange at $26 a share, at a total valuation of $18.1 billion, before it has even
turned a profit.
But if someone really wants to understand Twitter in 2013, just talk about Scandal.
Scandal is a primetime television show on ABC starring Kerry Washington and created
by Shonda Rhimes. Its a political fantasy (West Wing/ House of Cards) with plots taken
from the headlines (Law & Order) and a huge dollop of oldfashioned sexand
violence soap opera. Its a fun show and without Twitter, it would have been cancelled long
ago.
With her show struggling in the Nielsen ratings, Washington tried something unusual.
When an episode aired, she would livetweet it with Scandals diehard fans, who used
Twitter as a virtual, realtime water cooler. Soon, the shows other actors, writers and
staff, cajoled by Washington, got in on it too. (For a reluctant few she offered to pen their
tweets.) The cast, crew and fans started applying the same label the shows characters claim
for themselves; gladiators. They were a community. They were an army.
Two things drive people who arent news junkies or chronic oversharers to Twitter;
celebrities and live events. With Scandal, Twitter closed the gap between stars and fans:
Insiders teased bits of the plot, and fans lapped it up, adding their analysis and spawning
new threads. By February the shows cast and fans were generating 2,200 tweets per minute
during each episode, dominating Twitter on Thursday nights.
Like all great things on Twitter, Scandal quickly got out of hand. One of the shows most
vocal anonymous "fans" turned out to be an ABC executive. And a backlash began; in The
Washington Post, Soraya Nadia MacDonald panned the show as frothy fluff ". Its

entertaining. lts popular," MacDonald conceded. "But wheres the substance? Under the
surface, under tribal loyalty whats really there?"
You could say the same thing about Twitter. But that ignores how powerful and resilient
those 140-character thin slices can be, especially when theyre piled upon each other in
layer after layer.
Many of the big innovations from Silicon Valley seemed hostile to both traditional media
and the stillinitscradle forces of online media. Twitter is different. It is a
complement, not a replacement or disruptor, and it quickly learned to play nice with the big
media companies. The creators of newspapers, television, movies, and websites all use it to
extend their reach and better understand their audiences.
Twitter is now partners with Nielsen, the old media standard for measuring television
viewing habit, which means advertisers can now understand not just who is watching a
show but what theyre saying about it, where theyre located, and how influential they are.
In their communities. They can even glean the broad range of interests of these viewers.
Through a new deal with Comcast and NBC Universal, Twitter gives users chance to
convert conversation about television directly into ondemand viewing. A tweet about a
television show (whether sponsored as an advertisement or mentioned by a friend), can
direct users to watch the show immediately See lt," says Comcast CEO Brian Roberts of
one of the companys services, turns Twitter into "an instant online remote control. " Shows
can gain viewersand products acquire customers with a minimum of friction and
expense.
Expect more of this. Discussion about a new album book, movie, or magazine article could
steer Twitter users to a music video, an extended excerpt or movie showtimes in their area.
Once you turn Twitter into a portal for media and product discovery the wider possibilities
become obvious.
ln the runup to the IPO, Twitter was steadily staffing up to make those possibilities a
reality lt just hired Vivian Schiller, formerly head of digital news at NBC, to create
partnerships with media companies, using the Comcast deal as a template. And in August,
Twitter hired Nathan Hubbard, the former president of Ticketmaster, to be the companys
new head of commerce.
That means events and products in the physical world, not just the virtual one. "Were
going to go to people who have stuff to sell and help them use Twitter to sell it more
effectively" Hubbard told Bloomberg.
Combine this with Twitters experiments in automation and social recommendations and
you start to get a picture of a company whose technology is much more powerful and
lucrative than 140character updates on users breakfasts. @MagicRecs is a pilot
2

account that users can follow to see who their friends are following, favoriting, or tweeting,
alerting them to sudden surges of activity Its a powerful way for users to find new accounts
to follow or to see hot news they may have missed. But its applications for commerce are
clear: Twitter could soon be recommending a new movie to you-and direct you to where
you can buy tickets to see a showbefore you knew it had opened. Twitter becomes a
universal login with a clear map of both your social networks and interests that can deliver
goods based on what it knows you want and what you like to talk about.
Television is the laboratory: The endgame is everything you watch, discuss, or think about.
The perpetual worry for Twitter users, particularly those whove been with the service since
the early days, is that it will be used for sinister purposes. That it will become a force for
evil. That it will become everything they hate. That it will be like Facebook.
Facebook is Twitters obvious foil. Theyre both social networks, and theyre both ad
supported media businesses. But their cultures are starkly different. Facebook is closed and
private; Twitter is open and public. Facebooks original architecture is symmetrical (if
youre friends with someone, theyre friends with you), while Twitters is asymmetrical. (l
dont need to be "friends with Justin Bieber or Neil de Grasse Tyson to hang on their
tweets.) Facebook was built on photos; Twitter on text. And Facebook sucks you into its
portal, hoping you will never leave. Twitter was built to send you away so that you might
return.
The worry as Twitter takes more and more control over its ecosystem, is that it will become
a new version of Facebook. Reaching into the clouds meant that Twitter had to break with
some of its partners on the ground. Its old partners used to be developers who wanted to
build deadsimple or prolevel apps; now their partners are the top media companies in
the world. Bit by bit, Twitter has grown up. And growing up is a funny proposition for a
social media network, which continually relies on young people and the techsavvy early
adopters to push the envelope. Historically when a social media network grows up, it dies.
Already the whispers are starting: "the kids arent using Twitter or Facebook anymore.
Instagram. Snapchat. Thats where the action is".
In a 2010 interview author and avid tweeter William Gibson summed up both the appeal of
Twitter and many users worries about its future; "l hope they keep it simple. It works
because its simple. l was never interested in Facebook or MySpace because the
environment seemed too topdown mediated. They feel like malls to me. But Twitter
actually feels like the street. You can bump into anybody on Twitter. "
The worry is that as Twitter grows as a public company it will be forced to follow the
Facebook model, away from the street and into the shopping mall.

But Twitter isnt much like Facebook. The way Twitter maximizes its reach is to get tweets
cited on TV news, embedded in web sites, ported out to Facebook or Path or any other
network. Facebook may be a universal recipient; Twitter is a universal donor.
lf you read Twitters 5-1 statement to investors, the virtues they talk about are the antithesis
of Facebook; "Public; realtime; conversational; distributed." Twitter has so much more to
gain by distinguishing itself from Facebook, from Google News, from every other effort to
do real-time search, news and marketing, because no other company has its assets.
Shortly before its IPO, l called Facebook "the last great company of the desktop age."
Twitter is the first great company of the mobile age. And that mobilefirst pedigree gives
twitter an advantage both in business and in culture that few other companies enjoy Twitter
can continue to be weird, and it can make weird profitable. NW