Twitter: "What's Happening," Not "What are You Doing?"

Twitter has made a refreshing, helpful and important change in the basic question our tweeting bird friend asks us.

"What are you doing?" had been the question. The new question is "What's Happening?" That makes more sense to me, corresponds to the way I use the service, and I suspect will deepen and extend the use of tweets as a broadcast, one-to-many information service.

"The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates," says Twitter founder Biz Stone. "Twitter helps you share and discover what's happening now among all the things, people and events you care about."

What's interesting here is an important, if subtle shift from "you" to "the world around you." That isn't to say people will stop posting about where they are, random musing or what they are doing, as people.

It is to say that Twitter now is poised to become a more important "news" or "media" format, as it already has been becoming.  I like it.