by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
As you may know, when Twitter first came into existence, people did not know what to do with it. A lot of people took pictures of their food, for instance. Only gradually did people realize it had the potential to a whole lost of other things, especially breaking news.
I have long thought that there was something missing from Twitter. I want the ability to have intuitive “video tweets” in the sense that I would record a short video and then someone would respond in kind. Twitter has this ability already, in a sense, but I have never seen two people actually talk to each other back and forth using Twitter’s primitive and klugy video message feature. In my imagination, this new service would have it’s video tweets threaded so you could make some sense of it. I have only recently learned that TikTok has the basis for this notion. It wouldn’t take too much to change the interface just a little bit to make whole platform not only a whole lot more useful, but a whole lot more engaging for older people.
The only reason why older people need to get involved is the natural evolution of a social media platform to go from a silly toy of teens to something useful for adults with, like, careers and stuff. But I suspect my vision for TikTok is a ways down the road. And it may not even be TikTok that does it. It may be a similar service that caters to adults from the get-go.
One barrier to this idea, of course, is vanity. Just like the video phone never took off, there’s a chance that a “video Twitter” will never take off because people are so used to tweeting in the bathroom or at night before they go to sleep that they simply will have no interest in the very thing I propose.
I don’t know. Just an observation.
