Will Periscope Redefine What We Find Interesting?

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Will Periscope Redefine What We Find Interesting?
Twitter’s new video app is brilliant technology in a lush package—what a shame our lives are all so boring, right?

In November 2009, Twitter made a small, seemingly cosmetic, change to its web interface. For two years, ever since the site was still called “twttr”, the box for composing a new tweet had posed the question “what are you doing?”

But seeing how the site was actually being used, Twitter changed its mind. The new question was “What’s happening?” That paved the way for the modern era of social networks – but it’s something that Twitter’s new app, Periscope, might find hard to emulate.

Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone explained the change in 2009, writing: “Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering ‘What are you doing?’ with ‘Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,’ at this very moment.

“However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organising events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.”

As Stone pointed out, the change in the text field was merely catching up with how people were already using the site. But “maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad”.

The change marked an important self-discovery for Twitter: Most people, most of the time, are doing really boring stuff. The perception of Twitter as the site where people shared what they had for lunch, bolstered by that focus on the “doing” question, was something the site consistently struggled to overcome in its bid for user growth.

It’s not what we’re doing that anyone cares about, but what we’re thinking, what we’re remembering, what we’re happy or upset about, or what we like or dislike.

Facebook, meanwhile, always promoted that attitude: its initial prompt for status updates, the trailing sentence “Alex is …” allowed for almost any interpretation.

In other words, we all have rich inner lives. The great value of Twitter and Facebook over the past decade has been letting us share that with friends and strangers. Today, Facebook explicitly asks “what’s on your mind?”, while Twitter still asks “what’s happening” (after a three-year hiatus which avoided a question entirely, simply offering the option to “Compose New Tweet”).

periscope screenshot

But take a look at Periscope (or Meerkat, YouNow, or any other live streaming app), and you could be forgiven for thinking it’s 2008 again. Live streams on the app have gripping titles such as “drink with us”, “equipment testing”, “driving” and “i’m cutting steak let’s watch!”

Twitter was never really an app for sharing what you were eating; but Periscope, at times (lunchtimes), seems barely anything but.

The problem is that live video is a medium which is, at heart, fairly ill-suited to sharing thoughts, feelings or emotions. A smattering of Periscope streams have tried to work around that by performing to-camera monologues; but unlike YouTube, or even Vine, where that format is hugely popular, in a live feed, users stumble over the question of what to do with latecomers. Do you ignore them and carry on? Keep bringing them up-to-date as they come in? Turn the whole thing into a Q&A? I’ve watched streamers try all of them, and none have been hugely satisfactory.

What Periscope does excel at is sharing events happening around you. But for most people, most of the time, those events are dull.

It’s not yet clear how Periscope will square that circle. One possibility is that it will become the app that sits, mostly unused, on home screens until that one day when a user happens to be in the right place at the right time to live stream something interesting.

Another is that Periscope hones its private broadcast functionality to the extent that it becomes its main use. After all, what’s boring to a stranger might be fascinating to a loved one or close friend.

But maybe the outcome will be a reassessment of what we find interesting. If you’d asked 30 years ago, who would have predicted that the thoughts and feelings of strangers would be so engrossing that people would stay up late arguing with them, or collate the funniest weekly. Who knows what we’ll be doing with the broadcasters of the future? Just maybe dial back on the sandwich videos for a bit.

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