Tokyo based consultant, facilitator. Helps business & community on brand, market'g, strategic transformation. Loves curry, sweets, of course talks over glasses.
4/4/2007 - 24/7/2023 Twitter testament
I started using Twitter in April 2007. It was a service that was limited in what it could do. It was as clear-cut and powerful as the original iPod, which only had a music playback capability but later became a huge success.
I wrote an article for https://t.co/IVOMavnV6L titled 'Miniblogs attract alpha bloggers', which introduced the service along with tumblr, which was gaining attention at about the same time. The article was published on Friday and by the end of the week I had the first 100 followers. I liked the simple structure, the clear and easy to understand screen. Tumblr use did not take off for me, but I continued to use Twitter.
By the time I had a sense of the management's style of paying attention to and incorporating popular user-originated functions such as Mention, RT and hashtags, but never going overboard, I was convinced that this was going to be a very big foundation for the world.
After the article was published, I regretted that I should have written 'microblogging', but thanks to the strange choice of words I could notice the impact of my article, the term 'mini-blog' was everywhere in Japan until around 2008.
In June 2007, I visited Twitter's first headquarters building and met the founders, Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams. The conversation was brief, but a few weeks later I had the opportunity to talk a bit more with Evan Williams at FooCamp, an overnight event held at O'Reilly in the US, and learnt that Twitter, while seemingly a simple service, was also highly idealistic.
In late 2007, I started using Twitter on my iPhone through a number of third-party tools such as MobaTwi and twinkle, which connected me with many people who are now household names in the Twitterverse. This trend accelerated in 2008 when App Store opened and there were more Twitter Apps including official one.. Tweeting has become an established way of life.
Since then, the number of users has steadily increased in Japan, with celebrities, politicians and executives using the app. Masayoshi Son also started using the service. For some reason I still don't know, I was the only one followed by him for a few days. This was the only time I felt nervous and could not tweet much for those few days, but after a while I eventually couldn't stand it and resumed tweeting as usual. At this time, every time Son followed one person or another, it drew attention to that person.
Around the same time, Twitter created a system of 'recommended users' to assist the rapidly growing number of Twitter users, and it was at this time that I was contacted directly for the first time to ask if I could choose one. As Twitter was gaining momentum at the time, I was surprised to see the number of followers increase by a thousand a day. Towards the end of 2009, when the rigged elections in Iran and other events took place, Twitter was also beginning to attract significant attention as a new democratic tool.
Around this time, stories of miraculous encounters through Twitter and new collaborations that would have been unthinkable without Twitter were born one after another. I published several Twitter-related books to introduce them and gave numerous talks at universities and business seminars. However, I did not fit in with the marketing-related lectures I had once or twice received. They were the ones who only focused on 'having a large number of followers' and were calling for an increase in the number of daily tweets, actively encouraging people to follow each other and continuing to communicate only superficially. I was asked to give a keynote speech where I lectured "It's not the number of followers that is important" and "It's not right to force people to tweet". I was still welcomed, but perhaps they didn't listen to what I had said.
It was probably the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 2011 that made Japan realise the importance of Twitter most strongly. At that time, even though telephone lines were out of service, WiMax and other lines connected comfortably due to the small number of users, and I, who already had more than 100,000 followers at the time, spent the afternoon live tweeting from around Shibuya area. I was desperately observing the timeline and thinking "how can I be useful". The first thing that came to mind was foreign people who don't read Japanese ; I kept translating information from NHK and other news sources in English and tweeted. I also searched for people who were puzzled and gave them explanations. I also RT(ed Information from embassies.
The following day, I started observing tweets from people in the affected areas. I RT'd live information such as names, addresses and phone numbers of missing persons after checking the person's previous and following tweets. I also continued to RT information on victims who lacked supplies, hospitals, food supplies and water rations. Around the same time, I felt a sense of familiarity when I discovered that celebrities , whom I only knew by name through hashtags, were also doing the same thing out of a sense of responsibility with a large number of followers. However, when I saw that there were many people who replied negatively to these people, calling it a 'publicity stunt' for some reason, I felt incredibly disappointed.
Later, when discussions about nuclear power began to emerge, the clash of words became even more intense, and some people began to leave Twitter because of it.
I feel that it was also at this time that the shift to Facebook, where people can exchange information only with people they know well without being anonymous, progressed.
The Great East Japan Earthquake also exposed the problem of false rumours and disinformation via Twitter. However, I believe that the technology itself is not evil, but that people are using it without thinking about how the information reaches other people, which is why I wrote articles such as "Recommendations for official RT" and articles explaining how good intentions can turn into false information in the message game.
Twitter continued to be a powerful tool in every disaster since then. In Japan, Twitter was still the first thing everyone looked at when an earthquake struck.
More and more foreign media covered how Twitter helped after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and I wrote a series of articles with Tatsuya Yamaji on Google's official page (search for kiroku311), as well as several interviews with foreign media.
People overseas paid attention to how much information could be transmitted in Japanese using the same 140 characters. Roughly one tweet in Japanese was three tweets in English. After transmitting such information for a while, Twitter's head office in the US announced that the number of characters in English tweets would be raised to 280, among other things.
Twitter has changed once again with the birth of the Trump administration. President Obama was also a president who actively used Twitter well, but Trump's use of Twitter was clearly out of comparison: the legendary lying president, who also coined the term Post-Truth, was born because of Facebook ads, but it was Twitter that he preferred to use. Twitter. This is where the unfortunate use of Twitter went up (down?) a few levels. The world has become badly divided. The world became badly divided, which led Twitter Inc. to essentially kick Trump off Twitter.
However, this was the remote cause of the situation where the self-righteous Elon Musk bought Twitter. The fact that he couldn't turn the service around for so long is, of course, another problem.
But Jack Dorsey and others who created the service at least had the aesthetics to make a good service.
For the first time in a long time, I saw the despair of Silicon Valley capitalism in the fact that Elon Musk, who is only about money, can do whatever he wants to the service with the violence of money.
Even if the name of the service changes from now on, I think I will continue to use it because it has many followers and its nature as a tool to propagate information as quickly and widely as ever will not change.
However, I don't think that I will be able to treat the service with the same affection as I have in the past.
Twitter certainly had many problems, but overall I think it was a great service that brought a lot of positive changes to the world. The nearly 15 years I spent with this service have been a treasure for me.
Thank you @Twitter
#TwitterTestament #TwitterMemorial