A few years ago I joined Twitter just to see what all the fuss was about. Over about a month I wrote 24 Tweets, had 24 followers and followed 24 people. I liked the neatness of those numbers. There was the sense that I knew my place, that my output had some relationship appropriate to the number of people who were interested in what I had to say. I recall noting the narcissism or delusion that must have present in the person who had 59 followers but who had posted somewhere in the vicinity of 13,000 tweets.
My only memorable tweet followed my sighting of the then-CEO of Air New Zealand on a crowded trans-Tasman flight. He was seated in row one which was not my particular grumble. To be guaranteed front row status on the airline you are boss of seems like a reasonable perk.
What was noteworthy was the fact he also enjoyed the luxury of sitting beside the only unoccupied seat in the whole (large) business class cabin of a 767 aircraft. Insulating himself from his company's own customers did not strike me as behaviour consistent with a leader known as being a down-to-earth man of the people - especially when those very customers were all sitting in relentlessly close proximity to each other. And so I tweeted about it.
But Twitter, as a medium, just didn't grab me. Apart from allowing me to expose the foibles of Mr 1A, I didn't see the point of it. So I closed my account and never looked back. Goodness knows how those 24 followers must have felt. Bereft? Abandoned? I hope they're okay.
Then along came Hatching Twitter, a book by Nick Bilton, about "[h]ow a fledgling start-up became a multibillion-dollar business & accidentally changed the world" and I decided to see if somewhere in the story of Twitter's genesis and power struggles lay clues as to its intended purpose.
