Twitter wants to know 'What's happening?'

Saying it has "outgrown the concept of personal status updates," microblogging phenomenon Twitter announced it will change its signature user question from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?" Writing on the Twitter blog, co-founder and creative director Biz Stone says "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?' However, when we implemented the service, we chose to leave something out. To stay simple, Twitter did not require individuals to confirm relationships. Instead, we left things open. People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question, seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, ‘What's happening?'"

Stone adds that Twitter's open model has created a new kind of information network. "What are you doing?" isn't the right question anymore," he writes. "We don't expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter, but maybe it'll make it easier to explain to your dad."

For more on the Twitter tweak:
- read this Twitter Blog entry

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