We. Are. What. They. Are. Going. To. Sell.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009 by Dave Winer.

When people say they don't know what Twitter's business model is they're being silly. They know. We all know. "Let us reason together," a US President once said. 

They call it User Generated Content. We're the users. What do we do? Generate. What do we generate? Content. We're like the bacteria that make beer or yogurt. You put in the basic ingredients and out the other end comes content! It's cooool.  

It all came to me last night while I was sitting in a theater watching a really bad movie, a remake of a totally excellent BBC mini-series. You can tell it was bad because instead of being wrapped up in the plot or studying how they crafted the movie, I was trying to figure out how they got me in the theater. They got me in with celebrity hype. There were two great stars in the movie. I thought it would be great. I was wrong! I bought two tickets, they got $20 from me, and we walked out it was so bad. (In one scene Mirren walks off stage saying "Fuck you very much," which I thought was a perfect summation of the movie.) 

Someday, probably very soon, a movie studio is going to rent Twitter for 24 hours to do a special event for their movie. On that day 1/4 of the tweets you see will be about how great the movie is. You think you'll quit, and maybe you will, but a lot of people will think it's cool and they'll buy the product. Marketers love that kind of stuff. They pay big bucks for it. 

So if you think that having a lot of celebrities doesn't have anything to do with you, you're wrong. The point of celebrities is they say things that everyone hears. That's what makes them celebrities. You may not want to hear it but they're going to say it anyway and in the end you are going to hear it, like it or not. 

One more thing. You may groan when you hear Christmas music. But you hear it anyway. They own you for 1/3 of the year. And when you get to be my age, it's so bad that I find I'm humming Christmas songs all year round. In April I find myself singing "City sidewalks, busy sidewalsk, dressed in hoilday style. In the air there's a feeling of Christmas." And if you read that sentence, you're singing it too. 

Kurt Vonnegut described a novel-within-a-novel, Now It Can Be Told by Kilgore Trout, in which the main character is the only real human and everyone else is a robot sent to test him. It's a possibility I have considered.