From Biz’ post on Twitter’s shift:
Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”
Well, regardless of spin, this is a major shift, to my mind. Semantics matter, *a lot*, when your entire business is, well, semantics. Language is how we encode that which is essential to who we are. And there is a world of difference between “What are YOU doing” (emphasis mine) and “What’s happening”.
For starters, it’s a rather subtle leapfrog of Facebook, which has recently mimicked Twitter with its status updates. Facebook is stuck (but there are upsides to this stuck-ness) in a personal framework. Twitter, by moving past the YOU, is declaring Facebook’s imitation moot.
Will that stick? We’ll see. But I love to see the evolution of the space. It’s such good narrative…