Social networking giant Twitter has updated its feature question. Previously the service asked “What are you doing?” but now queries “What’s happening?”.
The change was announced in an official blog post by company co-founder and chief executive, Biz Stone.
“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?’” he wrote, but said Twitter has “long outgrown the concept of personal status updates”.
“People, organisations and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question.”
“‘What are you doing?’ isn’t the right question anymore,” Stone said. “Starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”
Stone said he did not expect the new change will affect how users operate Twitter, but will make it “easier to explain”.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
