Here’s a curious thing – the transcript of Twitter founder, Evan Williams’s, first interview on UK television – on BBC Newsnight. I won’t spoil it for you, and luckily the transcript is pretty complete so you can make up your own mind about it all – find it over at Guardian Tech online.
Read it? Ok, now what’s the overwhelmingly blatant conclusion? For me it was that the questions sadly betrayed a total lack of understanding even of Twitter’s most basic concepts, not to mention the finer points and more complex issues related to the network. I can’t help but feel that it’s hard to imagine such inane questions being considered worthy of featuring on the show in relation to an aspect of politics, the economy, or even sport…
This juxtaposed with the pretty sustained level of interest, familiarity and even hype among web types over Twitter provides quite a drastic gulf. Clearly the speed of Twitter’s ascent to status of web 2.0 darling has created a lag effect as non-webby folk are still fairly reluctant to jump on board. (Compare with Facebook’s mainstream familiarity for example).
I guess ultimately it’s a fairly good reminder that Twitter definitely hasn’t taken over the world – though on the web it sometimes feels like it…
Dejan Levi
