Your blog post about Twitter is bad and you should feel bad.
Nick Douglas says what is absolutely necessary.
A writer should never say, “Here’s something you don’t know about and shouldn’t care about.” So only read this if you read blogs like TechCrunch, or you work for a startup, or you want to feel very bad about some blogging/social media/marketing job you had to take even though in your heart you know it hurts the world. These are some thoughts I worked out since I’m the marketer for a very early-level social networking startup, and I want to get off on the right foot by pissing off anyone who could help this fragile little company.
So this joker Loic Le Meur asks for an actually useful feature for Twitter: Search results sorted by the number of followers, so people with huge audiences show up at the top of the results.
But he’s a cock about it, and he runs a company that’s basically YouTube but broken, so he starts a little war among a circle of pundits whose major contribution to the world is siphoning away all the boring people out of good parties and into their own. (To be fair, these people also employ thousands of conference-center janitors.)
So a confederacy of dunces argue over what makes a Twitter user important, and this putz Michael Arrington collects everyone’s rants and reminds everyone that hey, you don’t have to use features that you don’t like!
Since the feature in question already exists, all of the above bickering is moot, because Twitter solved this issue the way it solves all issues, by waiting for someone else to build the feature, which so far has worked fantastically. Twitter’s 2 millionish active users never see or hear about this whole argument, and all the pundits collect their checks from their blog advertisers and go home to various Financial District lofts, Atherton ranch houses, and Mission homes that they bought with a six-figure book advance and kicked out all the tenants.
So here’s my point, in bold so hopefully you just skipped to it: Tech pundits have nothing to do with what real companies actually do.
In fact you can judge how valuable a company is by how much time it wastes on pleasing tech pundits. At the bottom, there are the sniveling little startups that would do anything for a mention on the blog TechCrunch, because they’re not worth any real media attention. At the top, there’s Google, who basically says “Fuck you tech pundits” and gets back to picking whether TIME or Newsweek gets to put Larry and Sergey on the cover. Google even buys other companies so the founders of those companies can ignore more and bigger tech pundits and appear on God knows what obsolete newsweekly.
So if you are a blogger, or a marketer, or a startupper, and you’ve been worried about OMG WHAT WILL MICHAEL ARRINGTON BLOG ABOUT MY COMPANY or OH NOES OM MALIK THINKS MY MARKET SEGMENT SHOWS LITTLE PROMISE, just remember that these people are small versions of the business magazines that have been getting things wrong for decades, and they hire idiots, idiots, about four of them tried to hire me and my only relevant experience is a year spent making dick jokes about them (except for that time I predicted YouTube would go bankrupt before anyone bought it), and since Tech pundits have nothing to do with what real companies actually do then if your company is real, you’d better ignore them.
Except me because I love you.
