An important @robinsloan update

Hey, I’m going to go work at Twitter!

(This is the Twitter logo, in case you have not ever seen it.)

So, there are at least three things to cover. First: doing what, exactly? Sec­ond: what of all this around us—what of the vast robinsloan​.com empire? Third: whoah, let’s talk about how cool Twit­ter is! We’ll take it, as always, bird by bird:

First: doing what?

I’m going to be work­ing on media part­ner­ships with my friend and erst­while col­league @ChloeS. This couldn’t be cooler: it’s every­thing at the inter­sec­tion of Twit­ter and media, from live events on TV to cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism on the web to Na’vi tweets in IMAX 3D. (Just kidding—but you know Twit­ter is Eywa, right?)

Back at Cur­rent in 2008, Chloe was the mas­ter­mind behind our Twitter-​​powered elec­tion pro­gram­ming—prob­a­bly my sin­gle favorite project in all the years I worked there. So I’m hugely excited to be con­spir­ing with her again, and (soon) with all the pro­duc­ers, reporters, devel­op­ers and strate­gists at media orga­ni­za­tions that want to do cool, trans­for­ma­tive things with tweets.

Sec­ond: whither robinsloan​.com?

Don’t worry: all of this work con­tin­ues! I’m still plug­ging away on Pil­grim and still com­mit­ted to media inven­tion on a monthly basis. (iPad, hello?) This is def­i­nitely not a zero-​​sum game; in fact, I think Twit­ter is prob­a­bly the per­fect perch for a per­son inter­ested in—you know—words and tech­nol­ogy.

Third: wooo Twitter!

I’m excited to go work at Twit­ter because it’s a sys­tem and a ser­vice that I actu­ally, er, love. (Maybe you knew that already.) Now, okay, you don’t need me to tell you that Twit­ter is fun and use­ful. Got it. But let me just under­score three things that I think make it really, really special:

  • Twit­ter is built around this one odd, remark­able constraint—and if you ask me, almost all of its magic flows from that fact. Maybe once it was entirely a tech­ni­cal lim­i­ta­tion, an SMS thing. I think it’s become more than that. Frankly, I think it’s become poetry. Twit­ter makes me stop and think about lan­guage more fre­quently and more deeply than any other tech­nol­ogy in the world. What a great thing for a tech­nol­ogy to do—what a very human thing.
  • I feel like I’m con­stantly learn­ing and re-​​learning how to use Twit­ter. And I think that’s because, paired with this odd con­straint, you’ve got this crazy openness—this refusal to spec­ify exactly what you’re sup­posed to do with the ser­vice, or how, or even why. So those deter­mi­na­tions fall to us, and as a result, the whole thing seems to be con­vuls­ing and trans­form­ing, like, every six months. Do you remem­ber when hardly any tweets had an http://? It wasn’t that long ago—but now whole ecosys­tems have sprung up around the busi­ness of prepar­ing links for Twit­ter. That kind of fast, organic change indi­cates real health and strength. It’s also just really fun! Like a good story, with that cen­tral, dri­ving ques­tion: What hap­pens next?
  • I’m not a great pro­gram­mer, but I do dive in from time to time, and my first hands-​​on expe­ri­ence with the Twit­ter API, back dur­ing the elec­tion, was a rev­e­la­tion. Using ludi­crously sim­ple tools, and with­out ask­ing any­body for per­mis­sion, you can plug into this thing and get—well, jeez. You can get life. I don’t think there’s another API in the world that’s so sim­ple but so vital. And hon­estly, I don’t think we’ve come close to har­ness­ing all that it has, and will have, to offer.

So, those are all things I would have told you even if I wasn’t going to go work at Twitter—but they should help make it clear why I’m so excited that I am.

Okay, that’s the update. I’m going to con­tinue my wee­knotes here, but they will change in char­ac­ter some­what. There will no longer be any­thing about the per­ils and prac­ti­cal­i­ties of being your own busi­ness, obvi­ously. Instead, they’ll sim­ply chron­i­cle my “extracur­ric­u­lar” writ­ing and invent­ing, and the process behind it.

And as for all the cool Twit­ter media part­ner­ship work ahead: there will be a place to talk about that, too! When it’s ready, I’ll point you to it.

I start in mid-​​February.

Now I’m going to go tweet about this.