A new Twitter in the works?

You can’t get by without reading or seeing reports from Twitter as Elon Musk takes over.

When I first saw the video, I thought that he was bringing his favourite monitor to his new office. Then, I watched the rest of the video and I didn’t get it. But that’s OK; I suspect that there will be a lot of things that I don’t get coming up in the next while.

These days, I’m finding Twitter less and less useful for my purposes. I’m not alone.

Exclusive: Twitter is losing its most active users, internal documents show

I was going to take a guess but Twitter has it on record so I just looked at my join date.

I know exactly where I was when I joined. I was in a workshop led by Will Richardson who was talking about the importance of connections and statements like “together we’re smarter” had me convinced. I bought into the concept and joined immediately. It required a lot of work to make it happen and be of real value but, in the end, it was the best professional learning that I’d ever done for myself.

I haven’t regretted doing so but, like the author above, I’ve noticed that it’s less helpful these days.

Back in the day, we would have

• hashtags for everything
• Tweetups at conferences
• FollowFridays
• Pictures of food (OK, it wasn’t always professional)
• Twitter lists and sharing of those lists
• and probably a lot more if I continue to reminisce

Things are certainly different these days. I still maintain the FollowFriday thing and people seem to appreciate the connections. I think anyway. I still get pumped when it generates a new follower and the first thing I check is whether or not they have a blog and are from Ontario because I love to follow them.

It’s always been worth it to me. I truly do love to read blog posts, particularly about education. I find them to be truer and more authentic that news releases or articles written because some reporter has a deadline to meet. But most of all, I’m impressed when someone’s writing teaches me something new or leads me to find out more about things.

These days, I’m seeing more dead or dying Twitter accounts and abandoned Blogs than ever.

I don’t think that it’s necessarily that people have abandoned platforms but I get the sense that people are more scrollers on social media than in the past. In the past, there was value and worth by creating something or being supportive by sharing the works of someone else. It was a Personal Learning Network at its best.

Now, my timelines seems to be full of Wordle results or memes retweeted from somewhere else.

Musk claims that he wants to take us back to the concept of the town square where people gather to chat. Earlier in the summer, we walked the “Square” in Goderich (it really isn’t a square) on a Saturday and Sunday morning when the markets were set up. People had their own tables and were so welcoming to talk about what they were selling and some even recommended a fellow vendor when we asked for something they didn’t have. It was exhilarating to take do it.

There really was a sense of wanting to help each other out. It reminds me of the good old days of Twitter.

Can Musk take us back to that?