Twitter Snobs

Howard Bowden, head of news, Clarion Communications

Remember at school when you’d be the first to get into a band before anyone else?  And how rubbish it was when a bit later said band started having hits, and suddenly everyone else in your class was a huge fan?  So you’d look down your adolescent nose, and tell everyone how their earlier stuff was so much better…

Memories of classroom music snobbery came flooding back when I read a recent blog by Metro’s deputy head of content Richard James, who described how the joy and excitement of Twitter ‘had come to an end after six glorious years’, and how it’s ‘nowhere near as fun as it used to be a couple of years ago’.  Now, Richard did admit his view was ‘laced with a certain snobbery’, so fair play - and to be honest, he’s probably got a good point.

Anything that goes from zero to 500 million users in six years is going to change dramatically over time - and even a relative newcomer like me (I just checked, and apparently @howardbowden joined ‘Tue 17 Mar 2009 13:05’) can detect a decline in Twitter over the last three years.  Or maybe as more and more people join, it’s just harder to find the good stuff.

Oh well.  It’s going to be part of the very fabric of our PR being for a while yet, so I’ll try to resist the temptation of becoming a #twittersnob .  Oh yeah, and The Jam were much better before everyone else got into them after the third album.