Twitter is dead. Long live XCorp:
“Twitter Inc. has been merged into X Corp. and no longer exists. X Corp. is a privately held corporation, incorporated in Nevada, and with its principal place of business in San Francisco, California.”
1 Like
I have a twitter account I never use - got it only for a foolish chance to win a prize. But - Adam’s last sentence in his article about Musk’s dog makes sense to me. Musk is alluding to Scott Adams’ cartoon dog, Dogbert. When Adams appeared on a Sci-fi show, he insisted that his dog was trying to take over the world, as needed is the ultimate aim of Dogbert.
1 Like
I guess I’m not very compatible with social media. I joined Twitter around 15 years ago because it seemed less confusing and mixed up to me than FaceBook, and I’ve managed to avoid FaceBook since. But I tried Mastodon, and I found that confusing as well.
I left last week, losing some respected followers in my field, after Musk labeled NPR “state-sponsored media” and removed info showing who had retweeted something. I’d only used Lists for a long time anyway, to keep out ads and other promoted garbage, knowing it was too good to be true and that they would eventually destroy Lists too. I admire some things Musk has done, but his handling of Twitter has been nothing short of a disaster.
Now I have one follower on Mastodon. Am a bit sad about the followers I lost, but I never tweeted that much anyway, and I didn’t really like who I was when I did. Maybe Mastodon will become fun for a while, until someone decides it needs to make money and all the normies join, and then it will turn into a cesspool just like every other successful social network has.
The popularity of Twitter while important is not the most important thing. For Musk it is cash flow, he needs every week to receive a certain amount of money from advertisers and users to pay the interest and other costs. One of the problems is that advertisers are less likely to hand over money and the revenue stream from high profile users isn’t sufficient. It is basically a Business 101 fail, forgetting that the most important people for your business are the ones that give you money. What he should have done is to keep the restrictions on content and users and build the number of paying users. That may be difficult. Most social media is free, and it is free for a reason and that is that people can’t see it as worthwhile to pay the money. YouTube has a couple of paid options, one allows content providers to provide ad free content, the other allows consumers to access content without ads. I expect that neither of them provide Google with a lot of money.
Of this entire article, the thing that I mostly walked away with is FROGTWADDLE. I’ve never heard this word before. I like it. Going forward, I plan to use it as much as possible. Thanks, Adam.
1 Like
I’m deleting the back-and-forth on the Twitter label status of NPR. The point of mentioning it in the article was to show how arbitrary and uninformed Musk’s decisions are being, not to encourage wrangling over hyperbolic language or the nuance of single-digit funding sources. How precisely NPR is funded and how that funding flows through the network of independent stations is a topic for another forum.
I wasn’t aware that anyone else had ever used it and thought I had coined the word, but a Google search shows at least one precise usage, and another few with a space between frog and twaddle. The Internet is a big place. 
https://www.google.com/search?q=frogtwaddle
On the topic of extremely rare words, be sure to read this 2007 article.
2 Likes