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‘What’s Happening’ With Twitter?

Twitter users around the world have a few questions to ask themselves.  “What’s happening?” In what might seem like a minor change to some, Twitter users are now implored to answer that question rather than “What are you doing?”

Twitter’s company blog had the following to say this morning: “Twitter was originally conceived as a mobile status update service—an easy way to keep in touch with people in your life by sending and receiving short, frequent answers to one question, ‘What are you doing?’ However, when we implemented the service, we chose to leave something out. To stay simple, Twitter did not require individuals to confirm relationships. Instead, we left things open.

People, organizations and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question: “What’s happening?” A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.”

This simple change, means Twitter understands the concept of change and that it is at the frontier of it, in terms of social media. “Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about,” the blog explains. “‘What are you doing?’ isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, ‘What’s happening?'”

Twitter later told users “what’s happening” with the site. The company released the much-anticipated ReTweet button, which is now available for all users. With just a click of a button, anyone is able to ReTweet something another person tweeted.