Twitter

Garbage

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Photo by Gary Chan on Unsplash

It was early during the pandemic lockdown I was chatting with Scott Belsky, a long-time friend who is now the chief product officer of Adobe. We talked about products that would emerge as heroes or villains from the pandemic, and he predicted that Twitter would be on the debit side of the ledger. 

Every time I check out Twitter, I can hear Scott’s voice — Twitter has become a cesspool. Despite my best efforts, I ended up caught in the slipstream of negativity, anger, and just a feeling of righteous dissatisfaction. 

Elon Musk is wrong on this one — Twitter is no public square. It is a babel of loudness. Whatever it is, Twitter is not a social network. It isn’t even social media — it is a personalized propaganda network. 

In my effort to cope with Twitter — at present my only “social” platform

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Musings, Technology
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Everyone (including Elon) wants a better deal

Inside Twitter, employees told me today, there’s a mood of exhaustion. Rank-and-file staffers have little to no faith in the board, or in CEO Parag Agrawal, whose moves yesterday to fire the company’s highly respected heads of product and revenue look even more erratic.

Casey Newton reporting

The wrong guys got fired. Instead of an overmatched CEO, Parag Agarwal, Kayvon Beykpour (product lead), and Bruce Falck (revenue lead) got shown the door because CEO wanted to take the company in a new direction. I would have shown the big honcho the door. But again, the board is quite feckless. (Read: Musk or not, Twitter CEO has to go.)

Except for the CEO, no one in the company believes that firing these two executives was a good decision. Kayvon, who co-founded Periscope, was well regarded in the company and helped wrangle a good product strategy for the company. The palace intrigue is

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Technology
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Bully Pulpit

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This is the third in my ongoing series of posts about Elon Musk’s quest to buy Twitter. In the first of the series, I pointed out that Twitter’s CEO might be woefully out of his depth, and the board has failed to do its job. Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey agreed with me. I later pointed out that there is no (motivated) buyer (just yet) other than Musk. In this third piece, I point out that Elon’s intentions are self-serving. And why not. What’s the point of having billions if you can’t protect your self-interests — Om 

It might seem too cynical, but to understand every piece of news, I use a simple framework: behind every action is an agenda. And that has what has allowed me to make sense of Elon Musk’s decision to buy Twitter. Elon has offered $54.20 a share or about $44 billion, and

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A Letter From Om, Technology
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So who else can buy Twitter?

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Since everyone has decided that Elon Musk’s $54-a-share offer for Twitter is just a troll, the question remains who else can buy the company? Is there a suitor who can digest Twitter and deal with all its baggage? Or is the company destined to be a middling underachiever?

Twitter had adopted the poison pill plan that would make it difficult for Musk to achieve its goals and increase his stake beyond 15 percent ownership of Twitter. If he increases his stake to above 15 percent, then Twitter has the right to sell more shares to other buyers at a discount. That is, Twitter will find a white knight. The New York Post reported that private equity giant Thoma Bravo was considering a bid. The firm, which manages $100 billion, definitely has the resources to friend Twitter

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Technology
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Musk or Not, Twitter CEO Needs To Go

person holding a card with twitter text
Photo by Oleg Magni on Pexels.com

Elon Musk, currently the richest guy in the world, has decided he wants to buy Twitter. He has made an unsolicited offer to buy the company that would value the San Francisco-based social media company at over $43 billion. It is not clear whether he will be successful, but one thing is clear — in less than a month, he has turned Twitter into an eventual stock market piñata. In other words, Twitter is now in “play.”

If not Musk, then someone from the private equity industry or one of the big technology companies — most likely Microsoft, given their cozy relationship with the U.S. government — will try and buy a company that, at best, has been a chronic underperformer. The company will be subject to many upheavals in the months to come. And the only real question we should be asking is: Does

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Technology
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What is the future of social media?

As I ponder my future and (eventual) next steps in the journey of life, work, and creativity, I find myself trying to turn back the clock and blog as if it was 2001. Well, despite my Sisyphean doggedness, it is 2022. And today was not yesterday.

According to Jane Friedman, blogging (and, by extension, online writing) has changed. She writes about the online writing trends, culture, and publishing industry in her newsletter, The Hot Sheet. The informal, journaling approach to blogging that felt as natural as breathing air for me is gone. Instead, you need to focus if you want to have any impact. Friedman notes:

Instead, for blogging: Think about the potential value and longevity of the content and why people might be compelled to share it with others. Blog content, despite being free, should offer some of your most iconic and impressive material to be noticed and competitive.…If

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Technology
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04.04.2023 Musings

white ceramic mug and saucer with coffee beans on brown textile
Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash

Sometimes, when sitting quietly, enjoying a cooling cup of perfectly crafted pour-over coffee, I find myself staring at the back of my hand. In front of my eyes lies a landscape akin to the red sand of the American Southwest that lay baking under the scorching sun after a week of rain. You can see the time crisscrossing the skin, which has been losing a battle with the vanishing collagen. What was unseen slowly becomes more visible, crack by crack—a slow creep of the wrinkles. You can run, but you can’t hide from time.

When I am feeling down & urgently need retail therapy, I buy a pair of socks. Elon Musk buys 9.2 percent of @Twitter

Leichtman Research Group (LRG), a market research group, has collated the data for 2021 and “found that the largest cable and wireline phone providers in the U.S.

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Musings, Technology
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Who do you want to be?

Random Sunday musings — triggered by wide-ranging opinions about Neil Young, Joe Rogan, Spotify, freedom of speech, and censorship. What should be a nuanced and thoughtful debate has now been reduced to headlines, hot takes &, tweets. Even intelligent people have lost the plot and, in the process, have lost their sheen. Virulence is conflated with virality. It is sad, considering social media was an opportunity for us to tell the story of ourselves.

Since we control what we say, how we say it when we say it, and about what & whom we say, our words define us. With our words and our social presence, we can be anything – the choice is ours.

One can be:

• An idiotic version of yourself.
• A fake version of yourself.
• Or an authentic version of yourself.

Being authentic is hard. Social doesn’t reward it with engagement. No one likes, retweets, or

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Technology
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Can we ever become Post-Social?

water droplets on glass panel

With all the conversation of breaking free from big social platforms, owning your own digital identity, and being independent, I have been asking myself: how can all of us who have slowly become online performance artists ever be post-social? 

***

For the past two decades, most of us have grown accustomed to the idea of being online, being connected, and being part of a larger collective. It might have started as a social network of friends, but the social Internet has become a performative art since then. A decade ago, in an essay, Now You, Starring in a movie about you, I pointed out that “In our 21st-century society, we all want to stand out and get attention.” 

Today we have easy and free access to platforms that help spread the word about the movies of our lives — quickly. The Internet makes easy work of distribution. The concept of “followers” and

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A Letter From Om, Technology
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