by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
The word on the street is that Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated are for sale. Rather than let some insane Right wing nutjob buy them and turn them into a mainstream Brietbart, why not do something really innovative. Why not think outside the box and turn those the writers and editors of those three publications into something really unique.
The thing about Twitter is a lot of really powerful writers and editors use it as some sort of public salon where they sit around and talk about issues of the day. What if you designed a “Twitter Killer” made up of Time and its sister publications that had a similar purpose to Twitter but was much, much better.
It seems so obvious. It would be really cool and I feel it would be a near instant hit. What you do is you completely re-imagine Time. You accept that the the print magazine is doomed and have all the content that the magazine’s writers and editors otherwise produce dumped into your new Twitter Killer.
You could also use those very same writers as the seed group of users. They would invite their friends as you grew the service and it would help the service star off on the right foot. This is such an obvious application of Time that I don’t understand why someone with a lot of money doesn’t run with it.
Twitter sucks so bad that if you did as I suggest, it would be quite popular, quite quickly I believe. As I keep suggesting, you design the service by leaning on the concepts of Usenet from 20 years ago. But no one listens to me and the social media space isn’t exactly bumping anymore. People with all the money are too interested in AR, VR and automation to worry about something so blase.
But I really do like the concept. It’s really strong.
