Reinvention and Nostalgia: The Project to Remake Twitter
The New York Times
The company is undertaking a far-reaching effort to change how it works. For some, it is an echo of their early idealism and a vision for what the internet could have been.
In 2008, the handful of employees working for Twitter reached an impasse. Some were focused on preparing for a surge of new users to their social media platform. But one developer argued for another approach: Their platform, he said, shouldn’t be a platform at all.
Instead, Blaine Cook envisioned Twitter as a backbone for online chatter, one that would allow its users to freely exchange messages with people on other social media platforms instead of locking them into conversations among themselves. He hacked together a prototype to demonstrate his idea.
But the other Twitter employees dismissed it, and Mr. Cook was eventually pushed out of the start-up. Twitter remained a tightly controlled island on the internet and eventually drew in hundreds of millions of users.
