Twitter is Killing Twitter to Save Twitter

[Commentary] Twitter is about a single question, the one you see when you first load twitter.com: “What’s happening?” Yet Twitter, as it has existed until now, has done a terrible job of both asking and answering that most central question. And so the company is, effectively, trying again. Its newly-revealed Project Lightning, BuzzFeed reports, will be the core feature of Twitter going forward: a button in the living center of its mobile app’s menu bar, dedicated to providing useful information in real time. Twitter’s editorial team (made of real, live humans) will define the big stories of the day, and will package tweets, images, and video to explain what’s going on. Those packages will be the primary unit of Twitter, and will be embeddable all over the Internet. What Project Lightning represents, more than anything, is the long-overdue death of the Twitter timeline. (Or its demotion, at the very least, in the hope it’ll quietly resign.)

With this change, Twitter doesn’t have to look like an endlessly flowing, context-free stream of tweets; instead, you can see a hand-curated set of tweets, links, images, and videos related to what’s happening right now. You see one at a time, swiping through them until you get to the end. And there’s an end! In short, this effort puts a stake through the idea that Twitter is a social network. It’s not. It never should have tried to be. It’s not about people, jokes, and #brands. It’s about information, about news and pictures and stories. Twitter will show you, maybe for the first time ever, what’s happening.