But now, a different kind of bird has entered our ocean realm.
"Beware the birds with the sharp eyes and beaks, and billion dollar bank accounts," my mother once told me. "Don't listen to what they say. Watch what they DO." [Characters in this paragraph are fictional and not intended to represent people or events in real life.]
So....I'm watching, bird watching.
Some History
After a weekend of seeing more than the normal share of the fail whale, many twitter users, are grumbling @oprah, @aplusk, @cnn (and @cnnbrk) and @ev for potentially wrecking twitter. Is this just a capacity issue? Or is there something else going on?
Last Thursday evening (technically around 2am ET April 17th) @aplusk beat out @cnnbrk in a race to 1 million users. Soon @cnnbrk and @britneyspears also had a million, the latter rewarding fans for following with concert tickets. While the @aplusk vs @cnnbrk event in and of itself was fun (I watched and admit Ashton was cute in that hat), the whole event had another side to it. In spite of Ashton talking about donating to causes to fight malaria and the triumph of one small man against "the old guard", he's not exactly "the little man" either.
On Friday the 17th, Ashton Kutcher was scheduled to go on Oprah where she would write her very first tweet. Then Ashton would go on Larry King live. Since then, Twitter has been creaking under the strain of massive user growth, with fail whales, error messages aplenty, hanging pages and more. Hence, the aforementioned grumbling.
But that's not the real problem. Server capacity can be fixed, and you can certainly choose who you follow, and just stay out of the whole thing.... Or can you? Can I? Or have we already fallen for the bait, and are in the meantime, blissfully ignorant?
You know what the motto of a fisherman is, "You wanna catch a fish, use a lure." [Fishermen quote source from my imagination.]
C'mon, a "free" service? How much longer will we stay like Pinocchio in the daze of Candyland? Some of us are starting to wake up in the belly of the whale, because the uber convenient timing of the whole Ashton, CNN, Oprah Twitter event gives rise to one main reason to ponder... Was this planned?
And, if it was planned, for whom? Let's not be naïve. There's money and influence at stake folks. And it's not just about Ashton, one man. It's about Ashton building his brand. It's about Oprah, the brand, growing market share. It's about how the media moguls are going to work this Internet thing that has hit them upside the head.
We whales are resources -- cows of the sea -- and twitter is, after all, a business venture to begin with. Let's also not forget that classic neoeconomics [the biblical theory of any business] aims at an eventual situation that is win/lose when it comes to control over resources.
In the curious case of Twitter, we happen to be the consumer and the resource. The lure and the fish. Maybe that's why it seems so confusing. But I'm pretty sure the entertainment mavens have something figured out about it all, and they are working on an action plan.
So here I am, one Twitter fail whale up in the air. Like the square in Flatland, uplifted from my plane of existance for a moment, I look around. What have happened to the twitter birds that used to carry me safely aloft when things were amiss? Why do I feel like I'm being transported by new birds, with sharp beaks and eyes, somewhere I'm not so sure I want to go? Why are there so many other whales also in the air?
Maybe things will work out groovy for everyone. I hope they do, but I maintain a healthy dose of skepticism. It's not about keeping money away from Twitter either, as I've posted about before, it's about how it is done. And that's why we whales need to keep our own eyes and baleens sharp. I am not too keen on being part of a "new and improved" TwitterLand theme park marked by increasing fees and diminishing returns. Even if they tell us -- and I'm pretty sure they will -- that it's the only way in the end that we'll be able to save the whales.
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