People Talking About Shark Jumping

Some of you bloggers and TV talking heads are going on about how Twitter has jumped the shark. Some people are even clueless enough to tweet about it. If I may quote Jon Stewart for a moment, “Fuck you.”

Let me explain what jumping the shark means. You see, I’m old enough to actually have seen that travesty of television the first time it hit the airwaves. I watched Happy Days long before any shark jumping had occurred, and sadly, for several years after (fuck you too, Scott Baio).

In fact, what some of you throwing around that phrase may not understand is that pretty much everyone in America was watching Happy Days before that episode. It was the number one show on television already in its third season. The first four seasons were completely shark free.

What’s my point? Popularity and jumping the shark are not the same thing at all.

Twitter seems to have had a breakout moment during President Obama’s (Not) State of the Union speech, when people discovered that even members of Congress were tweeting. Let’s face it, when @senjohmccain started tweeting a grocery list of earmarks every day, Twitter suddenly seemed a lot less sexy.

However, for every Senator who thinks the Internet is a series of tubes, there’s someone who really gets it like @clairecmc. Senator McCaskill understands that she now has a direct line to express her opinion to people all over the world, unfiltered by the press. She writes her own tweets, and she sounded honestly surprised that people didn’t believe she reads every @ reply herself. Whether she’ll be able to do that when she has 100k followers instead of 15k remains to be seen, but she’s clearly someone who is curious about Twitter and inspired by its immediacy.

Now, back to Fonzie. Again, the problem with the shark jumping episode wasn’t that Happy Days was popular, the problem was that Fonzie was jumping a fucking shark. It made no sense. Someone at ABC decided that twenty-three million viewers wasn’t enough, and what followed was the screenwriter’s equivalent of the cheeseburger basehead from Menace II Society. They saw the lowest common denominator and aimed way below it.

Twitter’s situation is completely different. Twitter’s popularity has grown partly due to its embrace by celebrities, there’s no doubt, but the reasons people love the service (including those celebrities) come from several factors:

The 140 character limit pushes people to express themselves clearly. If you’ve tweeted long you’ve surely edited your ass off, trying to fit your ideas into that box while saving enough room for a tinyurl and a “RT @.” Users like @AinsleyofAttack take this idea to another level, composing tweets that are aphoristic and destructively funny in their impact.

Then there’s the social aspect of Twitter. It’s like Facebook without your mom, and without the bouncer at the door. It’s easy to locate new people to exchange ideas with, and to search for topics. Third party tools like Twitscoop, Twistori, and Twitterfall provide a pulse of the Internet, throbbing right on your screen.

What may be the biggest contributing factor to Twitter’s popularity, though, is its openness. The Twitter APIs give programmers around the world an easy way to plug their ideas into the Twitterverse, and there are hundreds of third party apps that extend Twitter in unique and amazing ways.

That, to me, is why the shark jumping analogy is such a massive fail. Twitter hasn’t jumped any sharks at all. It offers a very focused and open product. 140 characters of text, things don’t get much more straightforward than that. The day that the Twitter devs start building in tools to propose to your fiancee, or to tweet the URL to that book you just bought at Amazon, that’s the day I’ll consider the Fonzie comparison. I can’t see why they would possibly do that, though, when other people can already write any crazy apps they want (and any brilliant ones).

People Talking About Shark Jumping, please try harder.