Should Twitter change their tagline?
I wasn’t around when Twitter first started. If I was, I’d have the username “starman” instead of missing out on it by four hours.
From what people tell me, it was supposed to be a service where you could tell people what you’re up to. Hence, “what are you doing?”. The tagline worked at first, but Twitter has evolved beyond the humdrum answers like “having cold pizza for breakfast”.
Instead now we post thoughts, have conversations (small ones, I hope), tell jokes, ask questions. “What are you doing?” no longer seems to fit. The tagline of identi.ca is “what’s up, <nickname>?” which is better, but even that doesn’t fit when your micropost is a question itself.
My proposal is that Twitter change its tagline to something all encompassing:
“what do you have to say?”
It works better than “what’s up?”. It works for questions, comments, replies. It fits for anything someone wants to write to a microblog.
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Comments
I completely agree.
For me in addition to finding out what people are doing I use Twitter to see news headlines and see pictures and videos that people are sharing.
It almost feels silly typing something into a box that had the tagline “What are you doing?” when you are typing something that isn’t necessarily what you are doing at the moment.
I like your idea of What do you have to say? Or how about What do you want to share?
Their tagline should be, “What advertisement, blog post update, live streaming alert, chat with me live request, or breaking news headline would you like to spam to all of your followers?”
I actually like the what are you doing tagline. Even though we don’t strictly follow it, it gives an intro that anyone can meet. We’re all doing something even if the answer is breathing. What do you have to say? Well now it sounds important, and to many imposing. The sillyness of “doing” makes it light at easy to post and is possibly why it has taken off so much. Someone who maybe felt they had nothing to say might discover they did after writing what they are doing a while.
Sounds too close to “What do you have to say for yourself?” Sorry Dad!
But you might be right, Twitter may need a new tagline, at least for the newbies.
How about, “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout Willis?”